Randy Kardec explains why most traders fail: they hold magical beliefs about controlling outcomes instead of thinking in probabilities. He identifies four self-limiting beliefs that sabotage trading, from tying money to self-worth to confusing net worth with mattering. The fix is changing your mind, not chasing profits.
Trading is powerful. People who do the numbers, they look at the numbers and they see the potential and something happens. It's like magic. It's like suddenly out of nowhere, perfectly sane human beings become irrationally exuberant and they start thinking that they are going to mint and to make money. All they have to learn how to do is to trade and they're going to make all this money. And what happens when they do that? The interesting thing is they lose all logic, they lose all sense. If you were to look at them say, you know something, it takes a certain kind of psychology to be able to drive the engine of probability and to win in trading. It will just blow past them because what they've done, they have a magical belief that they're going to strike it rich and they're going to be the ones that win. And all they have to do is work hard and do it and somehow against all odds, they're going to win. Those people blow out of trading in about three years. They blow time away, they blow their capital away. And yet talking to them hardly makes any sense. I consistently have people who work with me who really see improvement in their trading. They can become consistently profitable traders. And they say, randy, I try to talk to other people about this and I try to convince them to talk to you, but they won't do it. They say, I've got it, I don't need that. And yet you look at their trading, you look at their trading accounts, the trading account's not lying. Yet they self deceive. They're held by this magical belief that has them believing that success is right around the corner and they just need to keep moving, moving.
That drives at least 98% of the traders who trade. And recently I'm reading about Samuel Clements, Mark Twain, and he got this bug too. He became obsessed with this magical belief that he was going to strike it rich. Prospecting. He burned through a lot of capital. He begged, he borrowed, he connived. But in the end, what happened? He was broke. He also found writing. But the thing is, when you see what happened and all these people, all these prospectors were smitten, they were taken by this magical belief that there they were going to make it. And yet what we see is this powerful belief. It's a survival belief. They would rather believe a reassuring lie than to listen to the truth, turn toward the truth and use the truth to transform the mind that they bring to trading.
In the bottom analysis, there's not a choice.
But to the limbic brain, there is a choice. They feel great, they see that just victory right around, right around the corner. And they feel, they feel surging. And they continue, they continue, they continue and they drill through their money and yet when they stop, they look and go, wow, something's wrong here. Why do I keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?
That was Albert Einstein's definition of insanity.
And we human beings are possessed by four beliefs, magical beliefs that just absolutely move us away from this notion that we really do believe we can control outcome. If you notice what people sell, they're selling systems that are certainty based. When the truth traders, good ones, are probability based. Completely different ways of viewing trading, viewing uncertainty. Yet what we do is we buy into beliefs. The first one is if I have enough money, I'm enough.
As if you can control your ability to win in trading, which you can't. So you're putting, literally you're feeling good enough, enough about yourself, adequate, at the whims of something you can't control.
But the body, the brain, the limbic system wants to believe that. The second one is about power. You know, if I have power, I'm going to have money and money's going to come. I feel powerful and yet it's the same thing to be powerful, to make that money. It's not like you control the outcome of the trade and yet there you are, drunk with power, believing you do until you get into the mix and get blown away.
That third belief is about your worth. What traders do is they confuse their net worth with their self worth and they say, you know, if I make money, then I'm going to have this worth. People are going to see that I am deeply worthy when in fact, again, if I make money, a really good trader knows that they don't control whether they make money or not. They control the mind they bring to perform.
And if they have a really good system, what they have is they have a system that allows them to be able to take the randomness of the markets, apply a standard practice to it over and over again consistently, that extracts capital. The last one, the last one is about mattering. You know, when I make a bunch of money, I'll matter. People will know. People will see what a big guy that I am. It puffs you up. It also takes you out of the mindset that can actually produce the winning mind. I want you to listen to those four core self limiting beliefs and then I want you to listen to the magical belief that drives people's obsession with making money and trading. The really good Traders aren't acting to make money. They are acting to perform well. Do you see the shift that has to occur in your psychology to be able to be consistently profitable? Well, that's it. And that magical belief, though, as long as you don't face it, as long as you say, well, I'm just going to face it. Like these guys, these guys who are coming to me saying, I talk to people and they won't talk to you. They don't want to face it. They don't want to face that they're going to have to change their limbic system once it wires in, wires in a solution to a personality, a way of dealing with uncertainty. No, it doesn't want to change. It's only until they're forced, at the very end, will they adapt the problem. Friends, when that happens, your capital's gone, your time's up and there's no. There's no remote that you can hit.
That starts the game over again. It's done.
What I'm asking of you is to really take a gut check with yourself. Take a look at the magical belief that you're living as a deception in and to begin to see that as long as I live in that deception where money's right around the corner, then I'm stuck. I'm stuck in this place where I'm giving all the power to define me as a human being to the whim of the markets, to the market gods.
What you control is the mind you bring to the performance of trading.
Friends. That's the holy grail.
The thing is, to do that, you have to look hard at yourself.
Forget the reassuring lie, accept the uncomfortable truth and build a mine for probability. If you're ready to do that, contact us. Contact us. We know how to teach you to do that.
And may the trading gods be good to you.
Ra.
