Why You Keep Adjusting Your Trades (And How to Stop)

Foreign. What's good guys? So just wrapped up a call with the bootcamp students. It's a weekly call I do just answering questions. And there was one problem that came up as like a core theme of today's call that I feel like I would make a video about because this is something that probably affects you, affects a lot of traders. In fact, even sometimes I fall for this myself, which is second guessing myself either on the trade where, you know, let's say I see a trade and it looks absolutely perfect, but for one reason or another I second guess, I hesitate, whatever, and then the trade goes away without me. I completely miss it. It hits the tp. The only thing worse than that is situations where you know it's a good trade. But even though you get like you get the entry, but then you just doubt yourself, right? You second guess yourself and for one reason or another you start moving your take profit too soon, you start moving your stop loss up too soon. Sometimes you may close the trade out, break even too soon just to see the trade eventually end up hitting the TP like half an hour later. In fact, this happened live on the call with the students where right before she went to sleep, let's call it F. F closed the trade and after brushing her teeth, she came back and Detroit closed in tp. And like the entire reason why that happened was she felt like, you know, oh, you know, price action was coming back too close back to the entry. And so she decided to close it out. The only problem with that is that that's an emotional decision. It's not a decision that is rooted rules. And so that's what I'm going to discuss. If this is a problem that you deal with, this video is going to help you. I'm going to break it down into, well, first of all, I'm going to explain why this happens. And then second, I'm going to give you kind of like a two step system. To be honest. There is really only two ways that you can fix this problem and it's the two that I'm about to share with you. Yeah, let's get into it. This one's kind of raw reason why I'm standing by the way. It's not to make some pretentious, you know, presentation or whatever. I've simply been seated for a bit too long. So you know, I figured when I deliver this while I'm standing, stretch the body out a bit, you know. So anyways, let's get into the root cause first. It's enough like it's Good to understand why this happens before we move into fixing it. So every single moment that you second guess yourself, you doubt yourself and you either hesitate on the entry or you change your TP and you, you know, fiddle around with the trade. Too much boils down to one word or rather one thing, a lack of confidence. And that usually comes from usually also one reason, which is data. So let me paint this picture. Let's say that you are new in trading, right? Let's say you're just starting out your trading journey. You could be brand new. You could also be a few months into it. You could also be a couple of years into it. But what's important is that confidence comes from knowing like without a shadow of a doubt that your system or your strategy that you're trading is profitable. Like over the course of 100 trades or a thousand trades, you know that even accounting for all of the losses, as long as you take this one setup, you're going to make more money than you lose over the long run. If imagine for a moment if you had that data right from a thousand past live trades you've taken, would you really be in a state where you're not feeling confident or would you be in a state where you feel like messing around with the trade? Or if you see a trade, would you hesitate? The answer is probably no. And that's how you know the pro traders, the people who have been doing this for a while, the reason why they feel like, why they seem so confident and why they're able to just take trades and like not second guess, not ask too many questions, just set the trade and forget it. That's the reason why they've been doing this long enough to where they have concrete, undeniable evidence that whatever that setup they're trading, it's profitable over the long run. And so the question becomes, then you know, how do you get this data? Because you know, obviously at the start when you, you're new to trading, you don't have this data. So step one, which is part of that two step system that I'm about to give you, step one is how do you start, right? Just instilling some sort of like, how do you just start building a base for that confidence and then the second one is when you build that true type of confidence. And let's start with step one because truthfully, when you're first starting out, like, you cannot just tell yourself, oh yeah, just be confident, like, yeah, you know, you're still going to doubt yourself like as long as you do not have enough data and you do not have enough examples, you're still going to doubt yourself. And that's perfectly normal. So step one to, you know, at least start on this journey is true backtesting. Now back, for those of you who don't know, backtesting is when you go. My favorite, by the way, my favorite app for this and the one that I recommend by far, like, don't even bother doing this on TradingView because the user experience on TradingView is just, it's more, it's more of a difference than night and day. Right? It's just a completely different experience. Back testing on TradingView actually feels like a chore. Back testing on FX Replay, which is the app, feels actually fun. Like it's easy to do and, you know, you look forward to doing it. So all back testing is, is that you're going back onto a chart and replaying it and then trading the chart as though you would in real life. But the only thing is that that's already price past price action and you get to just press a button to like, skip forward. So doing this allows you to do one thing, which is you get to compress experience that would otherwise take decades to of live market data to, you know, achieve. Like, basically imagine if you were a swing trader, if I told you now that you need to take a sample size of 500 trades before you can start feeling that true sense of confidence. Guess what? That 500 trades is not going to magically appear within the next day. It's going to take decades. So the beautiful thing about back testing is that if you're on the daily chart, you fast forward, skip, skip, skip, skip. You get to skip months of price action in an hour. And throughout that price action, you're going to be trading your system as though it was life. Okay, so that's the essence of backtesting then. The reason why you do this is because most of you, I assume most of you watching this video are, you know, somewhat more of a, either beginner or intermediate trader, which means that A, you potentially haven't even found the system that you want to trade long term yet, or B, maybe you've already found that system, but you just don't have enough practice yet. And so this solves both of those issues, right? If you let, if you watch a YouTube video and you learn a new strategy, then guess what, you should backtest this first for at least a hundred times. Like at least take 100 trades on backtesting mode before you dive into the live markets. Because if you just watch a YouTube video and you jump straight in with your life money. Guess what it's going to be like. It's going to be like if you watch a couple of videos on how to, how to shoot a basketball and you immediately put in an application for the NBA draft, you're not going to make it. Truth is, like, when you're trading, trading is a zero sum game, by the way. Like when you make money after winning a trade, you're not just kind of printing that out of thin air. When you make money, somebody else on the opposite side is losing money. Which means that when you lose money, somebody else is hypothetically speaking, like, you know, they're taking that money away from you. So this is a big, like, this is one big competition. Which means that whenever you take a trade and whenever you step into the financial markets, you're going up against, well, I don't want to use me as an example, but you'd be going up against people that have experienced, people that have millions of dollars of capital, hundreds of millions of dollars of capital, decades of experience, all of the top tier algorithms at their disposal, and potentially even insider data. And the only way that you're going to stand a chance is to at least have some kind of baseline level of confidence that, hey, at least from the last 100 backtests, I know that at least the system is profitable over the last 100, you know, like fake trades. Because backtesting is still back testing, right? Back testing doesn't necessarily translate over to the live markets. But if you don't do that first step, guess what, nothing is going to translate. Like if you just jump into live markets right away without back testing, you're going to go through the whole roller. Like you're going to go through the whole roller coaster from doubt to hesitation to second guessing to, you know, the whole spang. So that's step one and then you get into step two, right? Once you at least have that baseline level of confidence, which is only going to take a few hours at most to get, you know, 100 trades worth of data, at that point you already have some kind of baseline, right? At least you can go into the markets knowing that as long as you do what you've done inside back testing, which is ideally supposed to be comprised of one setup. Like when you're back testing, don't just start doing random things and like, oh, I feel like price is looking good here, or I feel like price is looking good here, so I'm going to take it. Or like, oh, I feel like Price is going to be set some rules for yourself. At least know what your setup is going to be and at least have rules for your exit. If you have that, that's how you make sure that your entire back testing session is not a waste of time. If you do that random approach, guess what, you could spend 100 hours backtesting. It's not going to yield any sort of performance in pre. It's not going to directly translate into to performance when you're in the live markets. So now that you have that step one and we move into step two, which is now you have to acquire data from the live markets. Now, if you haven't gone through that back testing phase, you are going to hesitate like, like race. But again, you're going to go through that whole rouse though. Nothing's going to get done. The only thing that's going to happen is you lose money. But let's say you finished the back testing. Man, I don't think I've taken a puff of this cigar for like the whole time this video has been rolling. Fact that it's still lit pretty nice. So once you've done so, once you're done with the back testing, right, you already have that baseline. When you get into live trading at the start, you're not going to have that. You're still going to run into situations where you're going to second guess yourself. And the reason for that is because in mactessing, you get to just kind of skip forward, right? If there's no setup, guess what, you can just press a few buttons and within the next minute, oh, boom, it's the next day and you suddenly have a setup. Or when you do take a trade, guess what, you can just kind of fast forward. All right? You either lose or you win. That's not possible when you're live trading, not even when you're sculpting. Because chances are you're going to wait a very long time until your setup shows itself so you can get in. And even after you get in, you are going to have to wait a pretty decent amount of time for that setup to fully play out. And throughout that process, you're going to see every candle open. You kind of inch up a bit. Oh, come back down to your entry. Oh, oh. You know what's happening here? And that's going to happen many times until your trade either loses or wins. But the key here is that at least you know how a good trade is supposed to look like, roughly how long it takes. Like, how many candles does it Take roughly to play out, to hit your TP or to hit your sop, and you have, again, that baseline level of expectation that comes from backtesting because you have data. So at the start, you're still gonna feel, you know, not fully confident, which is normal. The way you kind of overcome this phase is. I know this is about to sound like a bit woo woo, but the truth is, at the start, you just gotta tell yourself, all right, listen, I don't have the. I don't have all the answers yet. I don't have all the data yet. At least I know, like, if. If I just continue to do this one thing that I've tested a hundred times, chances are, like, it's pretty likely that I do make money. So, you know, just trust myself, right? Just trust yourself. Because the truth is, once you've gone through step one, you already know what a good setup looks like. You already know what to do. In fact, you have hard data to back it up. Step two, to get from, you know, backtesting or practicing, to get from, you know, not feeling confident to the place where you want to be, which is ideally making tens of thousands of dollars per month, feeling fully confident, being able to set a trade and just forget it. The. The only thing that's gonna. The only thing that separates you from here to here is literally data, right? Just more data. And the way you start going from here today is at the start is telling yourself, okay, just be confident, trust in the system. Because once you've done the practice, it's no longer about your ability as a trader. It's no longer about your skill. Chances are you've already backlisted one setup, so you know exactly what that one setup looks like. You know, what are the conditions that need to be met for that trade to be valid. You know exactly the conditions that needs to be met for you to take your profit. You know exactly the conditions need to be met for you to potentially stop your trade out or break even, potentially. Just let it play out, right? Give the room some trade. Sorry, give to trade some room to breathe, and either plays out or it doesn't, right? You're gonna get that experience and just trust yourself, right? Trust the system. It sounds very simple and it sounds very woo woo. But truth is, at the start, that's just how it's gotta be. Now at that point, the thing that kind of gets most people at least this is what I've seen with the students inside Bootcamp, which is, you know, they've gone through. You've. They've gone through all of their practice. Right. In fact, their practice has already been validated by me. Fun fact, like with every bootcamp student, they, what I get them to do is record themselves backtesting and speaking out their thoughts as they're going through everything so that I can see exactly what's missing or what they're doing well inside the thought process. So if they're catching all of these little things, I'd like, great, amazing. But if they're missing something, let's say they see this, but they don't see this. I'm like, yeah, you missed that. Or like, this is what you're doing wrong. This is what you're doing right. Keep doing more of that. The condition for them to pass this practice phase is, at least for me, when I watch three day backtest, are they at a level good enough to where if they want to take over my YouTube channel and make a daily video about analyzing bitcoin and calling in trade, are they able to do that? That's how I kind of like graduate them. Which means that if they pass this practice phase, they already have all the info, they already have all the knowledge. They already know what the good setup looks like. And all that remains is for them to continue taking those good setups and letting them play out. Not trying to mess with them too much because they feel like it may come back to stop them outbreak even, or they feel like this or they feel like that. And so there's kind of the process that led to me creating this video. Now, you may not necessarily have someone like me to kind of grade your backtests, but I've already given you the framework. And as long as you can stick to this and follow this two step system, guarantee you you will come to a point where you know, I want to. I don't want to make it to sound cheesy, but you will get to a point where all of your dreams come true. You'll be able to make really good money. Not stressing over the trades, just trading under like 30 minutes a day. Kind of like what I've shown on Twitter as well and kind of like what I've shown here on YouTube, like over the last 140 trades. Now, at this point that I've called In the last eight months, 80% of them have been winners. And amongst those 80%, it's a very simple process. I don't panic, I don't stress. I know exactly how the setup looks like when it comes up. I take it if it doesn't come up I move on. When I take it, it either wins or it loses. Or if I do move my stop to break even, I have a set like system or like I have a set amount of rules put in place where okay, unless these rules are met, I'm not going to move my stop to break even. Just to give you an example and as long as you follow this two step system, you are going to get there. But if you would like to get there a little bit faster, maybe if you want my help, my guidance, one on one. I work with you one on one. By the way, feel free to click the link down below, but otherwise I'll see you in the next video. Ciao ciao.