Transcription
So, maybe you're sitting there right now, a couple months, a couple years into this racket that we call trading, and you still either one, are losing money, two, you're chopping around, maybe you're winning some, you're losing it back, big upswing, big downswing, or three, you are winning, but just not that much. It's like a slow drip that honestly isn't really impacting your life. And that can all just be so frustrating. Trust me, I get it. I spent the most part of two years just missing the mark before I finally was able to touch some success. I actually have a video of that breakout moment for me after two years. I'll go ahead and link that above if you want to check it out.
But after that, success and consistency, it actually came very quickly. And for the next 11 years, up until now, I was off to the races. And looking back, there were just so many things that I wish I was able to know and internalize that would have helped me get to making a lot more money way faster. But the problem is, like many of you, I find myself, I found myself looking in the wrong spots, looking at the charts, the indicators, reading a book on volume profiles, or getting hung up on some macro guru online that I wanted to just kind of copy trade their portfolio. But the real stuff, the real stuff that matters, isn't found there. It's backwards. The foundational aspect is just, it's built wrong.
So, today I'm going to tell you some of the things that through my experience helped really move the needle to get to making that first six figures. Once you internalize this, you will finally break that precipice, finally become profitable or more profitable than you are now. And then after all of this slow, slow grind, it'll all happen at once. Most successful traders that I personally know, they all had moments like this at some point in their early career, where it almost seems like a lucky event, but that luck came from a slow build-up of a lot of ups and downs and experience through the way. So, let's get into it.
Before you do anything else, before you actually execute that next trade, let's go ahead and take a minute and try to ask ourselves some questions that you maybe not even ever asked yourself before, because I want to help you do what I like to call a trade funnel. By this, I mean I want to start very, very broad and think about some of the different, but very important things. Things that will help you funnel down to the best way to express your specific trades. Meaning like which asset, where are you going to trade that, why are you doing it, etc.
First is how do you think about risk? How do you internalize that? What's your life situation? Are you married with kids? Are you young without much responsibility at all? And now think about that situation and compare it to how you're actually thinking about risk. Do you love volatility? Do you actually, can you handle taking risk pretty well? But maybe you have a lot of life expenses and you have a lot of people that are relying on you to perform. What if you're really risk-averse, but you're young and you can kind of afford to push the envelope? You see how those things are a little bit mismatched in those two scenarios? So, we want to start thinking about how can we, how can we start lining those up a little bit better? We want to find congruency in all of this the best way we can.
Let's say the price of something, right, the price of a trade that you're making, it went against you. Is your instinct to hold that trade? Or is your instinct to panic and sell it right away? What if that trade goes in your favor? Do you take profit right away, or you let it breathe a bit and play out for more? Again, you'll notice I say this a lot, does that align with the previous things that we were thinking about? For example, when you start losing, if you do have a family and you are very risk-averse, but you tend to hold on to your trades when they start to go against you, can you see how that might actually be the worst thing you can do? You need to kind of find the volatility that fits you and your circumstance, which kind of leads us right into time horizon.
Which holding times feel right that line up with your goals and your personal schedule? Should you be in and out of trades within 10, 15 minutes, or should you only be buying and selling things at really extreme points that you plan on holding for years? It's different for you and it's different for everybody else. It all starts to funnel down the options. You might start working yourself towards specific assets traded on a specific platform, traded at a specific time with specific risk parameters that you set. Not all markets are going to be right for you. Kind of sounds obvious, right? Like a family man with a job who works full-time and can't be, you know, just hanging around looking at markets all day, who also hates risk, but is pretty good at holding winners. Well, maybe that leans specifically into long-dated call options in specific sectors and stocks that he really likes and believes in. Then going ahead and buying those at extreme times and specific buy zones that he really likes that could play out over a long time horizon. This allows him to minimize his downside, but maximize his potential returns. Or maybe you're some fully locked-in Gen Z'er who just lives and breathes internet, and one that loves risk and loves volatility, and can take those winners and losers super fast. Maybe scalping futures on any volatile index or commodity, maybe that's for you. Or maybe it's trading perpetuals 24/7 on-chain. So, it's like what will fit you and your goals perfectly. That's the goal of a trade funnel and obviously will help you probably be aligned with the thing you're trading. You put the wrong trading archetype in the wrong trading vehicle, well, you're just, you're never really going to succeed and you might not even know why. So, you need to go ahead and find your lane, and there is a lane for everyone.
Okay, now, what, what do we need to do next? Well, we need to try and take this job, whatever you want to call it, a lot more seriously than you probably are. Be honest with yourself. Are you truly, truly treating trading with respect? Have you audited your day to really understand when you are feeling at your best, when you're thinking the most clearly, when you're executing optimally? Maybe for somebody that looks like early morning, maybe it's a big chunk of the midday, maybe you're a night owl and you feel absolutely switched on then. Well, then why haven't you built your trading around that? Why are you just off the cuff trading? Why are you kind of always on a low simmer, maybe just trading from here, trading from there, you're on your couch in your hoodie trading on your phone? There's no cohesiveness. Why would I ever bet on you being a consistent winning trader? You need to build a custom session for you that makes the most sense for you and your energy levels and your ability to trade. And if you find yourself forcing anything outside of that session, well, then you're probably making decisions with a fraction of the capacity that you would have been making in that session. It would be low output, kind of fog of war, which is going to be producing terrible results that on the margin are eating at your success long-term.
Okay, so now that you have your session that's made just for you. What? One thing I find is that I talk lots of people about this is they don't trade enough. You're not taking enough reps. You're not getting them under your belt. You need to trade more. Some people are just taking one trade a day at one 30-minute segment of the market in one market. Sometimes they're not even trading at all because maybe they, they don't feel good today or they lost yesterday or something. I get it. You could, you could kind of chalk that up to being patient or trying to come back with a level head. But like, how are you going to learn about yourself? How are you going to progress faster? How are you going to hit these bigger goals? You need to start learning more about yourself by taking a lot more reps. How do you act under pressure? What are your tendencies? How does your execution trade when regimes are shifting around and volatility spikes or comes back to neutral? And I'm not talking about being reckless. I'm not saying size up or just trade 100 times a day. But like, when you are trading small, when you're just starting off, you need to get in the mix. You need to open yourself up to the ability to start self-reflecting. I can tell you much more about a trader who's had a thousand trades under their belt rather than somebody with 10. Like, does a guitarist get any better at guitar if they're just picking it up and strumming away once a week? No. And neither do you. So, get in the freaking markets. Trade here, trade there. Trade at night, trade in the morning. Trade stocks, trade options, trade crypto. Do it all. Where do you hesitate? Where are you good? Where are you consistently losing? Make mistakes, then make more of them. And no, again, that doesn't mean I want you to blow your account and tilt your face off. But come on, man. Do you think you're really going to get to six, seven figures if you're just trading one asset one time once per day? Like, come on. That's just pretty unlikely. And I get it, there's probably anomalies out there, so don't, don't drop me in the comments like, "Oh, I did. I know somebody who did that." All right, man. We get it. It's the, it's the experience and all of the downfalls that are actually going to be the thing that takes you to glory. So, if you're, if you're just that guy who's looking for one setup on one chart and believes that nothing else really matters and you're just kind of waiting on that one signal. Lots of successful chartists might actually agree with you. And they're going to truly believe that. But one thing they're not mentioning is probably their countless thousands of hours in the seat, the years of watching price action, the pattern recognition and the proper management over time of their bankroll. These are all tough intangible assets that you learn from what? Reps. More and more reps. That effectively leads you to better and better decisions around those setups when they come. Ones that, you know, they might not be able to explain at that depth in the moment of trading.
Okay, now, next is something that I mentioned in quite a lot of my videos and I will keep doing it because it's super important. And that is being the ability to build your network. And you need to be ruthless about the quality of that network, or else you will be wasting so much time. You cannot try to go find an echo chamber where everybody is just kind of confirming each other's thesis and never giving constructive feedback. You are not going to get smarter or better that way, but you will think you are. What you're doing is actually just getting more and more confident in a more narrow and narrow view, which could break at any moment. The traders who actually do grow the fastest, who do get to that 100k mark fast, find people and bring them into their world that think differently, who push back, who trade different assets, and who have lots of experience over a ton of different regimes and time. This network will be more than any course or any indicator you ever buy. I also made a video on building that network, which I'll link that one up here if you want to go watch that.
All right, so everything up until this point, all the external input and the newly added reps, it can only really work on itself with a solid reflection process. How are you going to end a day and debrief yourself? Not just like on your P&L, but on your decision-making. What exactly were you thinking and feeling going into certain trades today? What triggered it? You know, how did you enter? How did you exit? Did you get out too early because of something else, or did you leave a lot of money on the table? And was it oriented in your process, or was it just because of the result of something that happened earlier that session or earlier in the week? The traders that are growing the fastest are not necessarily the ones that are making the fewest mistakes. It's rather the ones who can replay those decisions most objectively, then go on to extract learnings from them, and then not only that, but they go ahead and adjust and implement those changes. So, build this practice. Give yourself some time and some grace. Journal if you want. Review. Debrief. Bounce your ideas off other people in that network and ask for feedback, and don't tell it to them in like a biased way that leads them in a way to kind of coddle you. It is a guaranteed way you can sharpen your sword. And piggybacking off the professionalism about all this, treat your sleep with a lot of respect. All of your non-trading life, time away from the screens, is just as important as your time at the screens. It is not siloed at all. If you're constantly tired, if you're never moving, if you're using uppers and downers to control your mood, and you're just maybe stuck on a screen all day, that's not just a health problem, that is a decision quality problem. Your brain is ultimately the instrument, and how you treat that is going to impact the output from that. So, move, sleep, eat like it really counts. The nutrition is important. Touch grass. Okay, just get away. And by the way, even aside from these basics, you should go even further. You should go learn other things. You need to start consuming some things outside of just markets alone. I personally have had countless insights from when I spend time studying history or psychology or conversations that I've had with people that are just, they have nothing to do with trading. So, you need to try and cross-pollinate here, because some of the edge that you're looking for might be in the places that you least expect it and are under-explored.
So, all right, look, everything we've talked about, right? Your trade funnel, your archetype, your instrument of choice, your rep count, your network, your intangible skills, and your lifestyle. Whenever you start stacking all that on top of each other, it compounds and something emerges. Some real edge. A real winning trader. Not some strategy that you copied on some YouTube channel. And not somebody else's framework that you painted over with your own behavior. It's your read on the market action. It's setups that come to you naturally and you alone. And it's an instrument where you have a feel that others don't. That's it.
Okay, so, let's pretend you've done all this now. You've started to get confidence and you've built a provable strategy. Something that's actually working that you can kind of explain and you can repeat. Well, there's no more tiptoeing. You need to scale. You need to scale now. It's time to get uncomfortable. You want to make 100k? You need to push the pace. I made this mistake in poker a long time ago where I got to a level where I just got so comfortable, so complacent, that I left so much money on the table because I didn't actually push up into the higher stakes when I was ready for it. So, I made sure to not make the same mistake when I started trading. So, you move up and hey, maybe you get smoked. Good. Move back down. Rinse and repeat. Move back up again. Eventually, that next level is going to start to feel normal to you. And once it finally does, once you finally feel like you've made it, push it again. Go to the next level. Your big goals in this space, they're not going to just wait around for you. The difference between 10k and 100k is very vast. Now, oddly, they're pretty similar. But on that kind of journey, on that road to get there, you'll notice that there's all sorts of things you're going to have to work through inside. But the only way to figure that out is you got to step up. You got to go for it and start to feel all those things and adjust accordingly. One thing that's important is you, you kind of got to know where your line is, right? You got to cross that line a few times so that once you do start trading for bigger size, you'll be able to start ride that line of risk a little bit more accurately. Because most people, they either go way over or they stay way too subdued. And importantly, through all of this, through every losing trade and every ugly session, you got to try to make sure that you're finding the silver linings. Not like a false positivity way, but in a real honest way. Maybe you sized perfectly even though a trade went against you. Maybe you took a clean loss and you cut it off in a moment where back of the day you would have averaged into that loser. You need to pile those positive things on top of each other because when you have enough of them, thousands of these provable points, you can put all those together and it starts to create confidence and self-belief that you actually know what you're doing. If you're kind of lacking that belief, if you don't have all of these provable, this evidence for yourself, the foundation will be real murky and this game will attack it and take everything from you.
Okay, so, last thing, you got to let go of the timeline. The expectations. I know you have the number in your head. I mean, I used it for the title of this video. I know you have numbers in your head and I know you have dates that you want to achieve that by, right? I want X by X date. You got to let it go, man. You grip it too tight, it's going to slip through your fingers. If you find the process, like that the money will come. And know the difference between experimentation and execution. Sometimes you will be testing, tinkering, probing with little size and learning. Sometimes, when you're just there and you're putting in the work, the opportunities, they'll present themselves to you. And those are the moments you can't chase. They will allow you to be ready to strike and go for it when they actually do show up.
All right, so like remember, 100k is by no means the finish line. It's a byproduct of becoming the version of the trader that you are seeking to be. Do all of this internal work. Build that foundation. And the success will find you. So, I hope this helps. This is just a little bit of a broader video. This is not financial advice. It's just for entertainment purposes only. If you want to join the Discord and talk to me more about this stuff, the link is in the description below. I hope you all make it to that six-figure level and beyond. I'll see you in the next video.