Talk to me, goose. A famous line from Top Gun anyway, it’s actually actually the name of someone who left a comment. Talk to me, goose five 50 on the video. What is your flight plan from a bit back when was that? About two weeks ago. You always seem to have nuggets of information that stick with me and others. I’m sure the challenge oftentimes can be the lack of sticktoitiveness before we see results. I find that the incredible indicator appears to be the solution when in fact something like support and resistance was the answer all along. I’m rambling, but I just wanted to say nice work, keeping us informed. Thank you. Talk to me Goose five 50, appreciate you being here and subscribing. It means a lot to me. I like to try to keep as much of a relationship with everybody as I can, even though it’s kind of through the cyber land here.
What is your flight plan? So we’ve been speaking all week about mental toughness basically, and understanding our behavior from a conscious and subconscious standpoint. And when I think of sticktoitiveness, it has to do with the relative strength, right? That’s what sticktoitiveness is to me. It’s R s i. It’s whatever other type of indicator that you look at for relative strength and the emotional connection that I actually have to my goals. You see, you are dealing with a situation in trading where the outcomes are probabilistic. And so I had a great chat with my friend Carter the other day on Thursday. I was driving in the car, which is kind of what we do here in la and we were talking about processing feelings around trades and how do you know? And the answer is you don’t really know. You only know up to the point of the expected value of your trade.
So for an example, if you want to put some math here, say that your rules, whether you’re following discretionary chart reading rules or whether you’ve crunched data like I do, or whether you use a trading simulator where you’re pumping information into a trading engine and it’s giving you backtested results, that’s certainly another way. Or whether you’re just going on hunches, like there’s all legitimate ways to do it. And let’s say that whatever your process is, you are accurate 40% of the time and that your winners are three times the size of your loser. So you can calculate the math in your head and figure out that you have positive expected value and that you should be following those rules accordingly. Now, there’s probably a few other things to say, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just start with that. Your average winner is three times the size of your average loser and you have 40% accuracy in terms of your correctness. So the first thing you want to consider is becoming emotionally comfortable with being correct, right? If you have that academic thing where
You’re to being super bright, you were a great student, you have to calibrate your system to become a new you, which goes back, I think to Monday and Tuesday’s episodes of this week that I had to do for myself. I was a pretty good student. I went to Ivy League school, but you have to figure out that when you have 40% accuracy in any other type of lifestyle, that’s failure. There’s no ever passing grade where 40% even because you don’t get graded on a curve here, you see, so 40% is epic failure basically from an accuracy standpoint. If the goal is accuracy, 40% isn’t close to success. Even if you doubled that, you’re still a B minus kind of student. You see what I’m saying? Some people are fine coasting at B minus. I myself am not. So you have to recalibrate your emotional constitution to become comfortable with 40% accuracy, fully understanding that and justifying it by saying, well, for sure I’m not winning a hundred percent of the time I thought I would when I went to the street, but because my winners are so much larger than my losers, I’m still able to make money and I take solace in the overall process with of course the big proviso being that I’m going to take small consistent losses, paper cuts, small attrition of your capital, your equity goes up, small attrition of losses, you make some money, small attrition of losses, and you also learn to trade your equity curve.
You don’t become emotionally invested in the outcome of any one particular trade because it doesn’t really matter for you which one you’re in. I could go on and on about this past week or actually last week because you’re listening to this video now, which was recorded last week today for me, which was last week for you now, and you never really know what’s going to work. I had four or five trades on and one, two, I had 1, 2, 3 that lost me small bits of capital and I think so I either had four or five trades on, I can’t remember coming into this week, which was last week for you, and I lost on all of them. And the one big one was I was short Nvidia and that paid for all the losers. And then some, my account was up, equity was up not substantially, but up a couple hundred basis points for the week. And that’s coming from a guy who’s a pro who knows what he’s doing. The number of losses that you have, you have to let go of that, it’s irrelevant. There’re es in the poker game. You have to pay to see the cards. That’s the way that it goes. And so do I care about the losses? No, because my account’s
Up. So I don’t have any emotional investment in the outcome of any one particular trade. I know the outcome of any number of them is probabilistic to begin with. So I surrender, right? That’s chapter two of the book. I surrender to that. I don’t care which one works to the extent that at least one of them does work, right? Again, I’m also not offsetting at three R and all that kind of stuff. I want to let the winners run. I want to surf that wave for as long as I possibly can. So I guess the question I would ask you is like, well, what evidence do you need? What evidence is there? Hint, there isn’t any. You only will know it after the fact. So then of course you can do a postmortem and then kind of again, conjugate, what was your anti expectation versus your ex-post realization?
What did you think was going to happen versus what did happen? Now, if you know the probabilities, you can start to calculate what’s the probability of you having a streak, either a winning streak or a losing streak, because probabilities are odds, right? You can convert them back and forth. So now you can kind of again, go back to your emotional system, look at your subconscious and say, if these are the numbers, either actual or via a back test, I can emotionally get comfortable with this system before I’ve put on a single trade with live money because I know what the numbers are. And if you’ve looked over many, many instruments and the model is therefore robust, the rules are simple, they’re not data mining or cherry picking, and you’re using 10 plus 10 to 20 years worth of data, you can kind of take solace that if that model stops working, it’s not going to stop working the day that you decide to use it.
You see those models can change and your trading has to evolve because the markets evolve whether you like it or not. But in my experience, models don’t typically go from having positive expected value to all of a sudden not having positive expected value overnight. There is an asterisk of course in oh 7, 0 8. The government said you can’t short bank stocks. So if that was an integral part of your system that might’ve disrupted things, but that’s because of faulty government regulation that disrupts the market. So all of these things can be learned behaviors that you can really work on ahead of time because again, what’s the goal? Is the goal to be accurate and take the W or is the goal to make money? And if you want to make money and bigger money in a shorter amount of time, in my opinion, you need to have a longer holding period where the winner is many, many multiples the size of your loser. And that again, kind of speaks to this whole question of intentions, equal results, what’s happening in your subconscious? That could be what’s really managing your system, you see? And so you want to
Be super mindful of all of that stuff. This isn’t easy. A lot of folks don’t want to look at this because it’s easier not to, right? Personal growth comes at a bit of an emotional expense because you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’ve been doing this the way I’ve been doing it and it doesn’t serve me anymore, and I need to shed that skin. I need to change and it has to start with me and it’s doable and I did it by myself. If you want some help, reach out. There’s probably a few places where you can get some help and you could still do it yourself. That’s what I did. And so that’s really all I have. I hope this week has been valuable for you. I try to think thematically because a lot of times it’s hard to just say thing that’s say one thing or one day of material that’s definitive.
There’s lots of angles to this. It’s multifaceted and psychology and emotional intelligence is a complicated subject matter, especially when we’re all taught from our environments how to behave. We have to be very mindful of our behavior and what our motivations are. So I hope that this week has shed some light on everything for you. Please like and subscribe, go to Martin Chronicle, get your free copy of The Inner Voice Trading. It can help you and in better describe the journey that I went through. It’s not a book on how to trade. It’s more of a memoir of what I had to go through and how I did it and what I thought with a lot of great feedback from some of the best traders that have ever lived, including Eds Coda, Micah Marcus, bill Dunn, who’s now retired, Victor sios in there. There’s a lot of great wisdom. You can get the audio book version for free because I own the rights to it and I can give it away. Anyway, I hope you all have a great weekend and I’ll see you Monday.

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Hey everybody. Happy Thursday. So I want to clarify a few points that I made about smaller accounts and trading that I kind of answered on the YouTube channel, but someone had asked about why is it so small or why do I recommend say 25 k? And Roman had answered an answer, which on some level is true, but it wasn’t the point that I was making. Apparently there’s a thing at the $25,000 level where firms are trying to protect you from harming yourself and they limit the number of trades that you can do and all this and that. I can’t tell you I’m an expert on what those rules actually are. It has to do with the number three and pattern day trading, and I don’t even know what the hell that means, to be honest with you. Don’t care to. But I do know that at that point in time when you have to think about what is your bed size, when your bed size is a number that you can live with, that’s okay financially for you, but it’s okay.
It’s also okay for you emotionally. And so you have to figure, and I know that there’s many in micro contracts that kind of help the smaller person. And by all means, if you’re out there hustling and you’re trying to knock it out of the park, by all means, I would be like, do what you can. So this is not me picking on you. This is me trying to give you some insight as to why it might be difficult for you to really make a lot of progress with a smaller account. In today’s day and age. Let me go back when I first started, bed sizes for that time were ranging from two to 5%. Hello, put on your frigging depends bladder control because that’s the ultimate stop order for the love of Christ, the king, 5% risk units. Now over time with for a whole slew of reasons that I don’t want to get into, including those that are kind of imposed upon traders by the allocators who want lower vol returns.
Lower vol just means when you look at your account balance, not the instruments that you’re trading, they don’t want to see your account up 10% in a day. Of course, every prop trader on planet Earth wants that, but if you’re getting an allocation from a third party, it became more common for them to seek 25 basis points, not 25%. And so you had to gear down the leverage in your account even if you were trading commodity futures to a lower range of leverage. Now, margin to equity ratio is not necessarily a risk management tool, but it does give you a little bit of a barometer on the level of aggressiveness for your style of trading. So what ends up happening is when you have say,
$5 in your account, so let me actually, I’m sorry, I’m all over the place. So we went from two to 500 basis point bed sizes to today where you’re looking at one 10th to maybe one half of 1% at the pro level on average to garner returns. The 2% bet sizing, 1% to 2%. That’s of course a personal preference. If you’re trading your own money, that’s fine. It’s just that if you are trying to go and get an allocation from anyone, you want to be mindful of what the environment is like. Okay, so having said that, when you look at having a funded account, meaning your own money, not one of these paper trading online thingies, I’m talking about your own money and you’re looking in today’s day and age, what would be considered a whopper of a bed size at 2%, that’s a hundred dollars if I do the math right, a hundred dollars for a $5,000 account.
And so now you have this kind of, it’s not that it’s incongruent because 2% of five K is a hundred dollars. It’s just that it’s so easy to hit it when you look at stop, stop-loss placement, it’s too easy to hit $100. And so I think the smaller trader in that regard, or the trader who can be tomorrow’s whale is a little bit behind the eight ball in that there’s not a lot of room in the account. There’s not a lot of give and without knowing other external conditions, like you can refund your account from time to time and you’re willing to do that to learn your craft by all means, because kind of what I did, I took much bigger risks though rather than 2% because I needed to grow my money much more quickly. So I was willing emotionally and financially to withstand larger drawdowns.
And that was true well into my professional career too. And so just be mindful of the fact that you might be more sensitive to how those things work and how the nature of what you think your protective stop is, right? Obviously if you’re dealing with the ein, if you can even trade that with five K, you’re looking at two points. Now, you could scale it down and trade the minis and the micros. I don’t know if that’s appropriate for you. Again, I’m not recommending you do that, so you have to hold me harmless. You have to figure that out for yourself. But then you have to say to yourself again, are you putting yourself deliberately in the environment where you’re going to be the small trader who takes small losses but also small gains? And so those kind of things all live in the same neighborhood. It’s very difficult to find yourself with a 10 to one, 10 R to one R trading situation unless you just happen to be in the right
Place the right time. So it was very, very difficult to grow your account from those small levels. It’s an enormous amount of work. Now, do what you can, but I think I owe it to you when everybody out there is trying to sell you stuff on their small term, short term, small time trading systems because it’s emotionally appealing for you and you want it to be true. So you’ll kind of lead yourself to believe whatever they say, which might not be in your best interest. And that can be, that can be other types of chat rooms or research or alerts via text or dms on Twitter or stock twits of course.
And again, be aware of what your emotional needs are. They could be driving the whole show here in the end. You have to eat your own cooking, you have to do your own research. You’re not going to trade your way to financial freedom by subscribing to somebody else’s system. And they send you 15 ideas every day. Which one are you going to pick? Again, you can disagree with me, you can dislike what I’m saying, but I’ve been there, I’ve done it. So in terms of that, it’s not contested. And I feel like the marketers absolutely want your money because to you, you are annuity for them. And the more people that they can get as a member paying them monthly fees, that’s their asset. So the membership, what you think is helping you is actually helping them generate revenue. So again, I’m not trying to be cynical.
Maybe there’s some gems of interest out there that can be helpful, but in my experience, the pros out there, and again, even if you don’t want to go pro, you have to do the things that the pros do in order to get the results that they get because it’s all behavioral at the end of the day. So in my experience, whereas the professionals and the hedge funds, sure they might get the research part of some soft dollar arrangement or otherwise, and it helps generate commissions for the clearing members or the prime brokerage firms, they ultimately have to live like and die by their own sort. They have to eat their own cooking. The responsibility of the trade, including how do you get the name on your list to the postmortem that you do when you’re out of the trade winner or loser, really comes down to you.
And the more that you’re willing to go to that spot of personal responsibility, the better off you’re going to be. Part of that’s going to be to make sure that you have an adequately funded account. And so while you might be able to get into the market and try a few things and try your hand at things with a smaller account, I think you’re putting yourself in a much harder spot because of the sensitivity to what small dollars mean. Small losses on a dollar basis mean as a percentage of your overall account. You really want to break up your money in as many ways as possible. And by that
2% risk unit, you’ve got 50 betts in your account. If you break up a hundred percent of your money into one 10th of 1%, now you’ve got a thousand mistakes. See, it’s very, very different when you have more money. So yes, you can break up your money, but divide five K by a thousand, what’s your bed size going to be at that point? Because the bid ask spread might be what your max loss is. You see, it’s harder. You put yourself in a bit of a financial corner if you’re trying to do this with smaller accounts is all I’m saying. That’s the point I wanted to make. I wish everyone the best, and I hope things go very smoothly for all of you. But I think as far as that’s concerned, there needs to be someone in the community who can have a little straight talk with you just to kind of give you some insight because again, we’re talking about self-awareness and what happens in your subconscious when you put in an account that’s in my mind’s eye underfunded.
You can find yourself developing bad habits because of this percentage, high percentage, low dollar amount equality. You see what I’m saying? And the goal is to learn about yourself so that you can understand why you behave the way you behave and why you do what you do. You might be reacting to the pressures of having an underfunded account. Anyway, all good here. I’m happy to, I don’t have all the answers, but I have a lot of good insight on these things because kind of how I started. But anyway, I appreciate you all being here, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody. Happy Tuesday. So today’s discussion is going to be on a phrase that I used and I still use very frequently, and that is intentions, equal results, right? Intentions can be things that you’re aware of, but also things that are in your subconscious. And I think given yesterday’s discussion on how do you change your mentality, you really need to understand how things from your subconscious can be driving the actual show. Like behavioral software. We’re all products of our environments. You, yours, me, mine, and one’s not better than the other. It just is what it is. Whatever we’re exposed to probably from our nuclear families and everything else, it gets imprinted on our minds whether we like it or not, and it’s very subtle. And so how you learn about money that way too? How do the people around you act and behave around money? Did they spend money that they didn’t have and use credit cards and figure that they’re going to pay it off in the future? Did they live week to week, month to month? Again, I’m not here to judge anybody, but if that’s the environment that you grew up in, you that was learned behavior for you, those people taught you about money.
And so again, you have to really study yourself and look at your own behavior to try to uncover the clues as to what makes you really tick. You know what you’re conscious of, but your subconscious can be a very, very powerful force. And if you don’t go to the heart of the issue of what’s actually driving you, nothing is going to change and you’re going to find yourself asking those rhetorical open-ended questions. Why does this always happen to me? Well, why it happens to you because you were taught to behave that way. It’s pretty simple process.
Why do they repeat? Well, there’s something that’s deep seated in you like it was in me to understand the world a certain way and to have certain style responses to stimuli. So again, you have to create a pattern interrupts or something like that where you’re aware of your behavior and you know what your go-to response is either verbally or physically. You might consider biting your tongue or sitting on your hands to reprogram yourself. This comes up a lot in and around when people who aren’t used to financial abundance find themselves in winning trades, but want to offset the winning trade too soon.
They don’t give themselves enough time in the winter to really make a difference. Maybe it’s they’re unfamiliar with being in a winning trade or the frequency that they’re in winning trades is too small, and so they cauterized the win just to be able to lock it in and say, Hey, here’s evidence. I have a win. Nothing wrong with that. I know what that feels like, but again, how does that conjugate with what your overall goal is? If your goal is to make as much money as possible for the risk that you’re willing to take, you might be otherwise biting your nose to spite your face. You might be getting out of these winning trades too soon so that your behavior therefore is not congruent with what your actual stated goal is. So then what’s got to happen? Those things have to find a way to converge.
Either you have to change your goal and lower your expectations of yourself. You just don’t have it in you to stay in winning trades. It’s too scary for you. Financial abundance might not really be what you want. It might look really good from the outside, but you don’t have what it takes, at least not right now to get there, and that’s a shot in the front pocket, so to speak. So that was also part of answer to my own question. How did you change your mentality? I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to be the guy who was all hat and no cattle because I had to have that integrity with myself. I very rarely give a shit what anyone thinks about me. I let go of that in high school. So it was more about what do I want for my life and how do I want to change from what I knew, which was living the life of a Raymond Carver short story of very much blue collar despair and turn into a person who owns assets and intellectual property and revolutionized myself.
That takes a lot of mental stamina. When you’re living and doing things in a world that have probabilistic outcomes, it’s not as sure as going to become an accountant or going to become a doctor or getting a law degree and then passing the bar. Those strategies, although, or those endeavors are by no means easy, but if you follow the path, the outcome is highly predictable. Of course, if you don’t do the work, you’re not going to pass any of the exams. So I presume those folks are very acting intentionally. So you need to look at your subconscious and go back and trace that because we’re all following emotional models. Why do we do it? Because it feels good. It’s convenient. We’re used to it. It’s kind of who we are in many ways, and you’ve probably said that about friends. Oh, so-and-so ranted about this and that.
Oh yeah, that’s just how they are. Well, they do that by choice everything. We live in a paradigm of personal responsibility. So if they allow themselves to act that way and they behave that way, that’s okay. It’s job security for me. That person’s never going to be a threat to me in the markets. You see what I’m saying? I also know that that person’s going to be their own worst enemy, and when we in the marketplace, the person who has the most discipline is going to walk away with the most money. You see, they come there on their own volition. No one’s putting a gun to their head or forcing them to do anything. But that in a nutshell is how the markets work. It’s a greater fool theory. You have to figure out how that all works and what is your role in that mechanism in charge of yourself.
I am not the boss of you. And so how does that unfold? It’s deep and it takes time. So it’s so not about chart patterns or one minute fucking bars, right? It’s more about what can you do? How can you stop sabotaging your own behavior? You see? Because ultimately we bring it upon ourselves. I live in that, this very Buddhist way of looking at it for sure. I’m not a Buddhist, but it is a Buddhist way that you are the cause of your own suffering and you can fix it. That’s the good news is that once you become aware of why you do what you do, you can make alterations. They don’t have to be swift necessarily and make changes. Rum wasn’t built in a day, but you can definitely make small changes and get used to those new feelings. That’s really what I did.
As you can see, there’s a multi-part answer to yesterday’s question because there’s just too much to talk about, and I don’t like going on for 30 minutes by myself here. I’m busy. And so at the end of the day, it’s challenging because again, you can do it yourself. I did. It took over four years to do it. So you can do it by yourself, a good coach. This is the kind of stuff that we do in the Mastermind, not so much to what we do with Victor’s class, but with the group and with the one-on-one. This is the kind of stuff that we uncover and help shorten the learning curve and accelerate the success if that’s what the person wants. If not, again, it’s okay for me. I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I have enough things on my plate. I’d really prefer to be painting all day.
That’s why I get up so early and call in my orders and just wait for my stops to get hit. I don’t want to be sitting in front of a screen all day hoping that I can see something. So that’s kind of why it’s true intentions, equal results, because your intentions come from your conscious mind, but also from your subconscious. So it’s in my humble opinion anyway, it’s in your best interest to understand what it is that makes you tick. Why do you do what you do? Where and from whom did you learn that behavior? And that’s tricky because those people, you probably have a strong affinity for them. You probably love them on a very deep level in many ways, but that doesn’t mean they were the best financial teachers for you. You see what I’m saying? So anyway, just my 2 cents. As always, thank you very much for being here. I’ll see you tomorrow with Ganja.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin, thank you for being here. I appreciate all the great feedback. Want to welcome all the new subscribers and the folks who are viewing the channel who had maybe seen me over at Be the Trader with my good friend Alex, great guy. He’s a great channel too. You should really watch all his videos as well. I also appreciate all the comments that you’re putting on the videos here. It helps me understand what really resonates with you so that I don’t end up blathering here at the microphone and recording stuff and creating videos that waste your time. But at any rate, I want to get to a few of the comments. If anything on the show really resonates with you, please like and subscribe. You can click the little bell thingy, get alerted when there’s new videos coming up. Also, I’ve been giving away the audio book version of my book, the Inner Voice of Trading, which you can get at the blog at Martin Chronicle Top right corner.
A great comment came in from, let’s just see, it’s Peak Profits FX that was commented on the video absent of intentional work yourself. Self-talk is weak. Thank you for your wise words. Question, how did you switch your mentality regarding trying to get out of your own way? It seems like I’m chasing the W instead of just trading my edge and it’s getting out of my way. It seems like the more I get involved, i e going to break even too quickly or when to TP take profits. Probably I do more harm than good. So I think that’s great.
I really think that’s great. The goal here is to get to know yourself. As I’ve always said, I think if you don’t know who you are, it really doesn’t matter what, because really not going to know why you do anything or why it’s important to you, and that speaks to how I figured this all out. I told you when I first went to Wall Street, I did everything wrong. All my assumptions were wrong, and therefore all the actions that I took were certainly helping me manifest who I have become today because you have to take the action. You can’t ideate your way to financial freedom or to trading profits. You actually have to do the work. And so it looks really messy upfront, and I think what I did to get out of my own way, thank God, was to better understand that this is not a game of accuracy. So I wasn’t hunting the W, the W was relative. Now of course it goes without saying that you need to be relatively correct, but from a mathematical expectation standpoint. So if you’re really thinking about this and I want to talk about it more
Tomorrow in terms of intentions, equal results, I kind of got the feeling that I was very good at keeping track of what my behavior was, including what was all my thoughts, what were all my feelings, and then doing a postmortem, what was the result of the trade? It was very time consuming, but I knew that I needed to kind of study myself as well as study the markets because I knew all the best traders had a certain thing about them that allowed them not to freak out when they were risking money. I didn’t come from money, so coming into money was a big change. Financial abundance was strange for me on some level, I wasn’t used to it, so I had to condition my mind to actually bringing that into my world. And you can ask yourself when you’re about to take that self-sabotaging kind of trade, why are you doing it?
What does it satisfy in your body? Are you doing this for what the short-term dopamine hit? Are you doing it for the W as peak profits fx, who’s a subscriber thanks for subscribing, by the way, is doing and is coming to understand that that can undermine you. Another thing to look at is what is the actual goal? What is it that you want your trading to do for you? Because if you want the emotional satisfaction, you might not be making as much money. The opportunity cost of that emotional satisfaction can be great in terms of financial reward, right? Because it’s very easy to take small gains. You could do it all day long, but you’re always going to be the small weenie in the crowd, and that’s not going to change. There’s nothing, as I like to say, there’s no outside solution for your, well, it’s not an inside problem at that point, but you know what I’m getting at you.
So I was able to study myself as much as I was reading fundamentals and studying charts and working with what was then called Lotus 1, 2 3, the prevailing spreadsheet of the day to kind of crunch the data. As I wasn’t much of a chart reader, although I can see the patterns, I think it was much more important for me to look at the data because that is kind of a forced objectivity kind of a deal. I think if you look at charts long enough and you’re emotionally invested in kind of wanting to trade, you can kind of talk yourself to put on any kind of horseshit trade that you want just because you want be in it. So the fear of missing out can kind of play a role and come from you from many different angles. It’s not just watching the darling stocks of the day, which anytime a stock becomes a meme, you should put it on a flashing yellow light.
If you’re into what they call now the magnificent seven, you’re probably not doing enough of your own homework, which is okay because it’s again, probably meeting a certain emotional need for you. And the needs are important. I’m not saying they’re not, but if you look what those emotional needs are, is that an integral part of what your goal is? When we do the coaching here, we get super intentional as to what is that goal, and we don’t go to lesson number two until you get crystal clear about what the goal is because everything that you’re going to do after that has to conjugate with the goal. And so people were like, well, I’m not really sure, but I just want to kind of do this and see where it goes. So that’s okay, but you have to understand what that type of vagueness and that sense of lack of commitment, I would never give you money to just fuck around and try anything on.
So you have to have a greater sense of urgency, in my opinion, if you’re not getting the results that you want and hold yourself to a higher standard because when no one’s looking, you can kind of do whatever you want and get away with it and you’re not hurting anybody. I’m not here to judge you, but we’re talking about intentional actions here. And so going for the W, what does that actually prove? You get a W on any particular day? Does it mean you’re a good trader? Who knows? Because the same rules for you are the same for me on any given day. I could have good luck, bad luck, good timing, bad timing, good analysis, bad analysis, and there’s always two payoffs. There’s the emotional payoff and there’s the financial one. In my experience, most folks are very weak when it comes to goal setting, and it’s not their fault.
It’s just that they’ve never been taught how to do it, and the goals that they have are mostly tasks or they’re about acquiring things with money that they want to garner and attract from their trading. Want to get a Ferrari, want to live on Central Park West, want to buy a basketball team? Well, that’s all great, but those are all things that you would do after having achieved a process that you can follow day after day to bring you the wealth to kind of do those things. So I don’t look at those goals as magnets that would bring you or attract you to the success or bring you to that spot because those are inanimate objects and the relative strength of you needing or actually wanting them in your life is not really as strong as you think. And then when you really start to understand finance, you realize you don’t ever buy a $400,000 car because it depreciates and you lease things that depreciate.
If you understand anything of finance, those are things you lease. You only buy appreciating assets. Homes are a little tricky. You have the emotional attachment of living there and raising a family and blah, blah, blah. That’s all great, but at the end of the day, you could look at a house or a home, really, the home kind of puts the emotional connection. A house is probably an investment. A home is where you live, but at the end of the day, if you’re carrying, if the bank has 70% of the equity in the note, it’s the bank’s house. You just happen to be occupying it. At any rate, there’s a lot of things to talk about in terms of switching the mentality because it brings to into sharp relief many other aspects of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And so I want to hit on those this week as best I can without going on and on any one particular episode. I like to kind of keep these things.
If you don’t happen to be engaged with YouTube, don’t forget, we still have the audio only versions on all the bigger platforms. I think it’s under either Martin Chronicle or the Michael Martin show. I’m not terribly fussy about how I set things up. I figure if the person who needs this is really looking for it, they’re going to find it one way or the other. I know that goes against the grain of what a lot of marketers do, but you have in the end, you have to study your own behavior and really understand why you do what you do and be super honest with yourself because there’s really no right or wrong answer. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not a bad person. Depending on what that answer is. It’s really just to have integrity with yourself and to ask yourself, why do I do what I do? What is it that I want out of it?
Right? Because you get what you think about, and if you don’t fully understand that, it might be because your subconscious is really driving the show, and we’re going to talk about that this week, but not today. So anyway, thanks all for being here. I appreciate all the comments. Keep ’em coming. If you know of anyone who could enjoy the show, please forward the link over because there’s a lot here. We’re starting to build a really big library of trading wisdom here that I think is not talked about enough. Most people are looking for, let’s look over charts. Let’s do a trade breakdown. And that to me is, as you can tell, as I’m looking to the side, here, is a snooze voyeurism in this world. It’s not as valuable as you think. Anyway, I appreciate you all being here, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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