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Hello everybody. Happy Tuesday. Michael Martin here. So I always forget to say this stuff just because I’m the worst marketer in the financial services space, but as you know, we have this YouTube channel when you’re joining to subscribe. We get really good data. Ganja calls it the algorithm. I don’t even know what the hell that means. Google probably has one, at least Ganja thinks so, but it tells us what episodes and what things really resonate with you if you like and subscribe. Apparently there’s a little bell indicator too that you can click and that it will alert you when we have new material. It’s okay if you don’t do it because I’ll tell you right now, we have stuff every day, Monday through Friday and Wednesday typically meet with ganja. But if you’re a person who likes to set reminders, I’m famous for setting reminders. I don’t like letting things fall through the cracks.
You might consider that. I also wrote a book a while back. For those of you that are new here, I don’t talk about it a lot. I’ve referred to it from time to time just because that saves a lot of time. Then you can go back and refer to, for example, the chapter on surrender chapter two of the book. If you want to learn more about what I thought about surrender as it relates to trading, I don’t have to waste your time here. You can go listen to it or if you have the physical copy, I give away the audio book version, which you can get at the main site@martinchronicle.com. Top right corner. You can get the audio book version of the Inner Voice Trading, which came out in 2011. You can get that for free on me. So yesterday we talked about living in a drawdown, and the next kind of thematic question that kind of relates to that is can you talk about what happens to you?
Abandon your rules, right? Or you put on rules under the guise of fomo, fear of missing out, and how do you behave around that? Well, again, early on I was doing a lot of experimentation. I was being rather promiscuous because I was trying to figure out who I was. I came from the hedging side where you kind of know what you need in terms of inventory. So position sizing’s pretty clear. You run an Italian deli, you need to know how many loafs of bread you’re going to need on average. So when you’re a speculator though, you don’t really need any of the inventory, so you kind of hedge to your needs. If you’re a user and you buy futures to hedge price spikes that could otherwise hurt you. Producers of commodities sell forward because they’re long. The physical users are short to physical inherently, so they buy hedge going forward.
That was where I was coming from and I turned that model into one to speculate with. I had to figure out the position sizing, algorithm aspect of it, the money management part as you would say, and so when I think about folks who are trying to figure it out at home without any kind of coaching, you have the fear of missing out, which you could think to mean I’m putting on trades that are outside my set of rules because emotionally I just can’t bear the pain today of something that can happen in the non-existent future. So I’m going to take an action today to kind of hedge against having a feeling that I don’t want to have tomorrow or next week because Nvidia goes to 600 and I’m not in it right now. It’s like four 50 to give you an idea. Then you have rule abandonment that is I’m likely in a drawdown or I have the fear of success, I’m up 20% and I can’t take winning anymore. It’s too painful for me, so I’m just going to stop following my rules and I’m going to change. I’m going to go from purely systematic to discretionary, which I’ve seen.
I won’t get into the names, but I’ve seen people do that and lose big allocations. So you have those two things, abandonment and fomo. Again, FOMO could be I’m going to take a non systematic trade and put that on because I don’t want to miss out on something in the future. I might emotionally need the win. Now after a string of losses and we talked about what’s a streak, what’s a string? What’s just a bunch of trades that didn’t make money? You can label them how you want, but remember the words have meaning. I tend to take things in stride because I don’t want to overemphasize things, especially the negative because I think a couple of things, everyone’s a pleasure seeker. Two, we’re products of our environment and three, an absolute truth is you get what you think about. So if you think about losses all day, I believe that’s a good way to manifest more of ’em.
So that’s why I don’t go berserk over losses because it’s just part of the model. It’s just the way that it works. Now, you could also look at what happens when you have what I would recommend if you’re trading. Again, this is one of the reasons why the majority of people who try to trade the NQ and the ein Es is because they’re trying to overlay six to 12 different strategies on one instrument, which kind of keeps them in psycho mode. Like Sybil, you have 14 personalities rather than thinking of having one setup that works that you could trade across any number of instruments, because to me the probability, if you looked across say 600 different instruments, the likelihood of you finding that one setup that really resonates with you is high. Whereas if you feel compelled to have to trade right, you automatically put yourself in that FOMO mode by looking at one instrument.
You can debate that with me, but I know my shit because all I do is study myself and I say, well, what would I do in this behavior? Why would I do that behavior? What would that mean? What would that signify? Where are my blind spots? Committee’s always in session, quiet down. I told you once. It also could mean no confidence. You don’t have confidence in your rules, you don’t have confidence in yourself, and that’s the worst because as I’ve said, and I’ve done this before, I’ve taken people who have average ability, maybe even borderline being as dumb as the damn doorknob on my door, but they could stick to the rules and behavior predicts where you end up and they had clear vision of what they wanted. They couldn’t tell you who the fed chairman was, but it didn’t matter because that information doesn’t necessarily help you make money.
We get paid to execute. So if you take people and you infuse ’em with confidence and help them feel good about their strengths, everybody has a strength. The thing is, can you minimize the things that you’re not good at? Even if those are things that you want to excel at? Sometimes like Ganja says, you have to be the in game leader and not the do list who’s like the quarterback on the football team. He gets all the good looking cheerleaders interested because he’s a star player. Sometimes you have to play a role that doesn’t have that type of sex appeal, but has an enormous amount of effectiveness. You’re looking at one, I was big for my age growing up, and the way football works is when you’re of a certain height and weight, you have to play the line because of your size and because of the safety protocols, you were considered unlimited when you hit a certain weight, and because I was quick and athletic, I started playing offensive line.
I played center for eight years. I was a center center’s. Never in the newspaper, never. But if you fumble a snap, if your shotgun goes awry, and I did all of it, I did offense, I did shotgun, I did point after touchdown, and I did the deep snap for punting. They didn’t let me play both ways. Why? Because you needed three people to replace me. A lot of responsibility, no glory. We had a ball control offense. We were on the field for 40 minutes. The defense had white clean pants at the end because they’re never on the field at the end of the day. So you have to know what role you want to play. Do you want to be famous or do you just want to chug along and kind of get your business done? So you have to figure out what are the feelings that come up for you when you’re trading and you don’t have patience or you don’t have confidence?
Investigate those feelings. What is it about not having patience that doesn’t work for you? Why can’t you sit on your hands? What do you think is happening in the world that you have to get in on? I guarantee you, if you investigate that more than half the time, if you look at those things and the actions that you take when you have to feel the feelings around being patient, you’re doing yourself a disservice. So it would make sense for you to kind of become comfortable with those feelings and look at them. Why do you do what you do? Because at the heart of it, it might be coming from your subconscious and it might be not the sole reason, but could become or could be and exist to be a big chunk of why you do what you do when you have a sense of fomo or when you’ve become discouraged because what happened in the real life anti didn’t conjugate with what you thought beforehand, anti, and you’ve abandoned all your trading rules, your systematic rules, your discretionary chart reading or your particular setup you see.
So that’s why we focus on the emotional and the psychological here because that’s usually behind all of our actions and that’s why I advocate learning a lot about yourself because once you learn about yourself and your sense of self-awareness, who you are as a person, what makes you tick, you’ll have a better sense of knowing a couple things. For example, remember I said there’s two payoffs to every trade. There’s the psychological, the emotional, and then there’s the financial. A lot of times at the beginning you’re looking and grading yourself by the financial payoff so that you can get the validation. Nothing wrong with it part of life, right? We do that in all walks of life too, not just in trading, so I’m not talking shit. The point being though is that if you look at a couple of basic things, let me give you an example, a pullback to like a 20 period, exponential moving average that has a certain emotional payoff to a trader that runs that type of model.
Forget the financial part. Person who buys a 37 and a half day breakout system that has a certain emotional payoff. Person who does a three and three quarter day and 11 and 15, 16 stay moving average crossover system. That too has a certain emotional payoff. The goal is to figure out what those emotional payoffs are, which to me, I could teach ’em to you. They’re kind of easy, but how do you find the person that you’re going to marry probably have a lot of attributes. Main thing though is their chemistry, compatibility, so you need to conjugate who you are as a person. Why you want to study candlesticks or divergences in one minute bars is beyond me because that doesn’t help you understand if there’s compatibility. So most folks make the mistake of trying to study things from an intellectual standpoint because there is a self-esteem building kind of a deal aspect to that
Doesn’t necessarily, it’s going to help you trade. It can feel good to learn things. I love to learn stuff. I’m always taking chances in learning new stuff, experimenting with my painting and doing collages and all that stuff. I don’t want to get into it anyway, I think I’ve handled this thing very, very handsomely so far. If you have any questions or concerns, please write and let me know and I’ll embellish, or you can email me privately through the website and tell me what you’re working on and I’ll help you that way. Otherwise, I’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja. You have a really good episode. How do I know we recorded it already, and I will see you again by myself on Thursday. Take care.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. We have some really good episodes with Ganja coming up. We recorded two of them Thursday for this Wednesday and the following Wednesday just because we’re busy and we have the time. We like to get those things recorded so we got ’em in the can as they say. We answered a couple of questions. One is about position sizing around a five standard deviation move. I’ll let you watch the episode. We covered that in detail. The other one is, is it better to trade short term to turn over your cash and then avoid overnight risk and is like, no, I go towards overnight risk. That’s where, to me, the money’s made for the way that I do it. So avoiding overnight risk would put me out of business. I know many of you think differently because you’ve been taught somehow that overnight risk is too risky and if you’re trading too large, I suppose it can be, but the way that I do it, the money is actually made overnight.
Two, there’s a fallacy of being able to turn your money over faster by trading. So it’s like the example that I used was if you look at all the denominators of a number like 60, do you want to make 60 trades and make 1% or do you want six trades that make 10? So you kind of just get to decide how to do it. It all kind of adds up though. I haven’t seen any evidence that moving your money faster can get you where the end goal is that fewer trades that have bigger returns can go right, because all about the math because, and the frequencies are largely equal, again, depending on your setup, so you can kind of figure out what do you want your trading to do for you anyway, today I’m going to talk about another great question that came in from somebody about living inside of a drawdown. I don’t really differentiate winning periods and streaks. I don’t think in terms of streaks, winning streaks or losing streaks. I don’t think about losing streaks. Now, at the beginning when I didn’t know what I was doing, that stuff might’ve had a bigger impact on me. I just don’t remember as far as seeking validation, I kind of knew that the rules had a positive expected value. I just hadn’t seen it happen in actuality. So my mindset example would be put yourself in a spot where
The expected value of a trade and say you do a thousand trades, your accuracy rate’s 40%. So when you look at the result of any one particular trade, you’re basically saying, okay, I have a small paper cut loss that goes over here in this basket. You have a winning trade where you make your three R or whatever your number is. Okay, it might be fewer, but it’s a bigger parcel, so to speak. I’m just going to put that in the winner shelf. And so then over time, I have the benefit of a lot of history. I’m able to say I take everything in stride, I guess is the easiest way to say it. There’s really no reason to get worked up or to feel differently because I’m in a drawdown because I expect them.
I try to minimize them through position sizing because I generally have an idea. Again, none of this stuff is backtesting predict the future, but it can help you anticipate things. You can always emphasize again, the parts that make you most uncomfortable, which of course would probably be how many drawdowns do you have over a 20 year period of time. So that can help you and your emotional constitution. You got to figure you’ll have at least one a year depending on your size too. Your position sizing and drawdowns have a lot to do with the magnitude of the drawdown and its duration. So you can kind of position size around not just how much you want to make, but how to also minimize your drawdown. So I don’t really think of it as something I have to live through. Someone had cancer and we have to endure or blah, blah, blah.
It’s just more like if you want, I always say it this way, even if you don’t want to go pro, you probably want to get the results that professional traders get, and that means you have to kind of dovetail your behavior with what they do, even if you’re only just going to run your own money in house. And so in that mindset when you’re a pro trader, you kind of understand that losses are part of the business and so you just take ’em in stride because you expect them. It’s not that you celebrate them. I don’t actually celebrate the wins either because it’s just part of what I do.
My trading is an extension of behavior, which was conjugated completely with my emotional makeup, and I guess I know it’s easier for me. I have a lot of experience, but I don’t let anyone particular trade put me on a tilt. Neither a big winner nor a loser. I don’t have big losers. I don’t let them get there, and I’m very willing to surrender a position to get out of it if it’s not going in my direction pretty quickly, and I just come back the next day and kind of see or follow my rules like you would do. So I don’t have any real special trick in that if you’re going to do a thousand trades, you can understand that you’re going to have a drawdown. I think what’s difficult is that a lot of folks are doing discretionary chart reading at home, and they don’t even really know what the expected value of a trade is.
And so if that’s who you are, to me, that says a lot about a person’s behavior. You must have a lot of faith in somebody else’s rules. But I couldn’t operate like that because I’m responsible for the p and l. I don’t get to delegate blame to fast money people or Jim Cramer because I have his action alerts if he still has that or some investment club or any other type of alert service. I got to shave my own face and every day. So everything that happens inside the portfolio on the p and l comes down to me. So I anticipate that there will be clusters of wins, there’ll be clusters of losses. I don’t necessarily call them streaks. Streaks I think really kind of happen for people who are doing discretionary stuff, which is certainly one way to go. But I don’t become emotionally invested in the outcome of anyone particular trade because it doesn’t really say much.
It’s just part of who I am and what I do. I’ve detached. I love with detachment is an expression that you hear. So that’s what I do. I love it with detachment. I put on the risks that are worth having, and I know generally speaking how frequently I’m going to lose, and you take everything in stride, and that’s important because you can go on tilt for winners and for losers. I’ve seen both sides of it. Certainly when you’re losing money, you can throw up your hands, you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re following somebody else’s rules, and you can be just like, man, this sucks. I just can’t take it. I’m going to go for broke. That normally doesn’t work out all that well, and it makes a bad situation or a trying situation anyhow, because it’s really all how you define it. You define that situation as being good or bad. There is no book of trading rules somewhere like the 10 commandment that says at 5% you’re in a draw down after 10% you’re in a losing streak, and then somewhere after 20 you suck. There’s none of that. You put the labels on it. Remember we talked about there’s a difference between using your judgment and being a judge. So you use your judgment to put on the trades that you thought were going to make you money. The outcomes showed up the way that they did, and now you’re going to judge your own judgment when
Many ways you didn’t know what you were doing from the very, very beginning. So you can be disappointed. But again, they say expectations have built in disappointment. So you can do all that stuff before you even risk a dollar and say, I don’t know the back testing rules, I don’t want to spend the money on a trading engine. I don’t want to pay a subscription service for the data, and I’m unwilling to drop that kind of coin just to get the results. I’d rather just do it and wing it. So then to me, at that point, you don’t have the right to go on tilt, right? You didn’t do the work because even if you did do the work, you’re still going to have drawdowns. The difference though is that you can better anticipate putting your rules into a simulator to see how they would’ve done, because typically when people are sold systems, they’re sold on the outsized gains.
They’re sold on the abundance part. When an allocator looks at a potential trader who can create alpha, what they want to take a look at is a couple of things. What’s the daily volatility of their account balance? In other words, when you look at percent rates of return, how much does it go from 1,000,005 to 995,000 to nine 90? Then up to 1.2. So they look at those jumps because they have to ascertain, are you lucky or are you good? Do you have a way of being in the right place at the right time, or are you betting too big? You can also go on tilt if you make a lot of money. I’ve seen people have a winning streak, which is just dumb ass, random luck. Nothing wrong with it. I’ll take it, so will you. But they’re like, ah, I’m onto something. I could have made this much more if I just changed my bed size.
So now my R goes from being a half a percent to a whopping 2% or more, and that typically happens at the peak of the equity, which means you have to trade your equity curve. So living through the drawdown, I do the same thing that I do when I’m within what you would probably think of as upside or a winning streak. I behave the same. I’m placated. I don’t get overexcited about gains. I don’t get overly worried or despondent or whatever about losses. Again, I’ve got the benefit of several decades of experience, so it’s probably easier for me to say, and I don’t mean to minimize whatever you might be going through, but again, part of me is a Buddhist and believes that man is the cause of all his own suffering. So basically you need to really, really think about what are you willing to do to develop your craft? Because if you have certain strong feelings about being in a drawdown, the money is incidental, right? Who cares about what the money is? The monies are just a way of keeping score, but it’s really what do you start thinking about yourself? What do you start thinking about your process?
Do you judge yourself and all that, or do you start putting the blame on other people? That’s why I’d like to be self-reliant because I can’t blame anybody else anyway. I’m putting on the damn trades. So who’s there to blame Victor? That’s going to go over well. Can you imagine hearing that conversation, how to lose a job in three seconds? Anyway, so I appreciate the question. I hope I’m addressing it. There’s just a sentence that comes across as a question, so I kind of have to figure out what’s the intention or where the person’s coming from. I hope I did a good job, but ultimately I just try to stay placated in good times and in bad tomorrow’s another day. I’m never going to let anyone trade define me as a person or my track record or my self-worth and my self-esteem. It’s just part of who I am at this point. It’s what I do, and I’m powerless over the results. The best thing I can do is control the controllables as the late great Ken Za said, who was a mental coach for the Chicago Cubs. I took my sons to him too. He sadly passed away. He lived in the South Bay. Great guy, and control the controllables. What can you control?
Hope that helps. I’ll be back tomorrow, and like I said, we have some really good episodes coming up with Ganja on the next two Wednesdays. Hopefully there’ll be a streak there. You never know, but I appreciate you all being here very much, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey, crime stoppers. Let’s talk about, again, kind of taking it from Tuesday and yesterday. Yesterday being Thursday. Let’s take a look at other language that we might find, because when I see things like in the marketing speak, they talk about high conviction trades, and I think whoever’s using that, it’s a bullshit term, high conviction trade. Even if you’re at my level, your conviction, anytime you’re going to add risk, your conviction should be the same and you should be expressing your edge. Otherwise, there’s no trade. I guess what I’m getting at is, and I’ve mentioned this I think before, is that conviction, if you’re using that expression, means bias because none of us can predict the future, and until you’re perfectly honed with who you are and what you’re doing and why you do what you do to speak, you don’t know what conviction means, basically.
Sorry to say it that way, but conviction is a bias, and you can find yourself intuition and getting into situations that you otherwise have no business being in. I know people use that, but it’s too, you have conviction in yourself and in your behavior, for sure, but the list that you’re putting together is completely discretionary, right? When they talk about your watch list. Now, if you’re doing systematic trading, you don’t have this problem because you have forced objectivity. You’re screening the data for criteria, and the computer doesn’t let anything slip through the cracks, and so I would like you to focus on your own behavior and on your ability to execute. That’s where you should have conviction, trust, faith in yourself, another synonyms, but to say that you have a high conviction trade, they should, all the trades that you put on should have the same level of importance, I guess is the word. And if all the criteria aren’t there, there aren’t stages or staggering levels of why you should put a trade on. There’s one set of rules, so therefore every trade that you put on should be the same conviction, so much so that you don’t even need the word anymore because of all the objective criteria are there.
If you’re new and you’re starting out and you’re saying, well, I need this criteria for this type of a trade and this criteria for this kind of a trade, again, I think you’re putting yourself
In a tough spot to try to be a different person almost on every trade. There are people out there for sure who have many, many years of experience that could learn to do things one way and then add upon that once they’ve gotten a certain type of ethos down, you’re looking at one. But I didn’t start that way. In fact, I had to oversimplify things because everything I thought I knew what I was doing when I went to Wall Street was completely wrong, like everything. So once you figure out one thing, then yes, you can come back and figure out a second, but to try to figure out four different things and have different levels of conviction, fuck are you talking about?
So you have to be careful. I know that there are people out there selling services and marketing, and they choose their words deliberately because who, for those of you who are at home feeling insecure about yourself, who wouldn’t want to be a high conviction type of person? But that’s what I’m trying to say. You have to have conviction in your own behavior. The list is discretionary. If you add risk, it’s because you have an edge. You can’t have varying degrees of conviction. There’s either risk on or there’s risk off, and each instrument that you put on whatever it is that you’re trading, if you’re going to add risk, long or short, there’s no varying degrees of conviction. Why would you be wishy-washy or at a low end of conviction and still want to put a trade on? Remember, there’s two different payoffs for the trade. There’s the financial payoff, then there’s the spiritual, the psychological, the emotional payoff. What are you doing it for?
You probably have a balance of both, but if you’re risking money, then you absolutely have to get a rate of return and have an ability to make money. Otherwise, you’re just being a philanthropist and you might as well steer your money to a cause that you believe in other than some other traders’ account. You know what I mean? So I spend a lot of time thinking about this because I want to remove as much bias from my own behavior as I possibly can, because typically when you get into using that type of language, it’s because you’re trying to solve an emotional issue with your trading, not necessarily a financial one. Even though when you say conviction, the ruse is that it is a financial win, but I find when I really look at the word, it’s used for psychological reasons. So look at that in your own behavior and look at the words that you find yourself using because they can be carrying a key to your subconscious that you might be able to use to study yourself and study your behavior and improve. And improving might be simplifying your process. It
Might mean putting on fewer trades or finding rules that have higher expected value, and ultimately you wouldn’t focus on in that language, only the highest conviction trades. There aren’t any others, especially if you’re starting out. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense if your R is one and your rules make you 3, 4, 5 R when you win, it wouldn’t make sense knowing how randomness works to put on a suboptimal trade, i e lower conviction trade, if the criteria that you need aren’t there a hundred percent of it to me, then there’s no trade. And earlier in your career, you don’t want to start changing your bed size. You want to stay consistent because if you’re doing things on a discretionary basis, it’s very difficult to track your behavior. If you’re all over the place, if you’re changing instruments and then changing bed sizes, it becomes too much. You become a Jekyll and Hyde, and to me, when you’re starting out, or if you’re just starting out, even if you’ve got 3, 4, 5 years experience to me, you’re going to get much better results.
If you can focus on doing one thing and being one person later in your career, you want to add to stuff, that’s great. But until for sure, because you’ve got the evidence that you’re onto something trying to be, it’s like be a people pleaser. You’re trying to be everything to everybody as opposed to just being yourself. So I would say get rid of using those words that have enormous amounts of bias because it could, like I said, be a key or a foray to your understanding how your psychology works in and around, how you manage risk, and how also you develop your craft. Anyway, that’s all I have for you today. I appreciate you all being here. It’s been a good week. Please like and subscribe and have a great weekend. I’ll see you Monday.

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Happy Thursday, rock and Roll stars. So when I go back to Tuesday’s episode and give a coaching tip on something that I always do, I learned a long time ago before I wrote the book about the difference between using one’s judgment and being a judge. And so this comes down in the chapter about self-talk and your inner voice basically. And when you think about the grind, your words have power, right? So when you say, I’m grinding, it’s a struggle. I don’t like to use that type of talk with myself, because then what you find is that you get more struggle, you get more grind. So what you want to try to say is, I’m thriving. I’m in the process of discovering what works best for me because it’s really the same situation. But how you frame it, I think has huge psychological implications on how you get out of it, if that’s the goal. Sometimes people like being, they love to wallow in the mire, as Jim Morrison saying in, come on baby, my fire. And I think, so this is one of the things that I do when I try to think about how do I speak with myself and what do I shut up when I’m talking? No, just kidding.
So there are lots of voices going on in my head at any given time. So you pay attention to the positive talk, try to reframe things and say it in the positive, say it in the present tense, because I am going to be a world-class trader. Might sound powerful, but when, right, because I am going to, is the future tense and in the paradigm that I exist in the future doesn’t exist. All I have is right now. The things that I’m looking for tend to happen in the future because of the work that I’m doing right here, right now. So when there is a struggle or a grind, I don’t really perceive things that way. I perceive markets as stalling as part of the nature of markets, and I’m lucky to participate in them. The goal is to keep your losses small throughout any particular market cycle, if you want to call it that. But I don’t want to label things as being difficult because then I’ll just see the difficulty in everything you see. And so I try to frame it in the mindset of I’m gathering data, I’m evaluating the data right now. I’m going to study the data, quantify the data, maybe come to some conclusions if I can iterate practice, and then I get to any of that data or wisdom into my current trading platform, rules, system, whatever.
So you can do a lot of great work as a homework assignment for yourself. If you start to think in terms of where in your life are you actually being a judge and being judgmental because that means bias and that you typically have to be taught. So instead of doing that, use your judgment and evaluate the situation and put it in a positive spin. So in the case of the Tuesday’s episode, we talked about someone who was struggling for three years trying to trade within a two hour window before focusing their efforts on a nine to five situation. And I was thinking that might be difficult to navigate because you forced yourself to have to make money in a very short window of time where the people you’re competing against, you’re probably competing against yourself admittedly, but the rest of the market has more time to sit and wait to let things evolve. Now, if you trade the open, certainly you can trade a system. I’ve talked about those before and the benefits of having overnight risk, and you can certainly hit me up if you don’t remember that point you in the right direction.
But I think it could do wonders for your mindset if you start to think of things in the positive. But then you also have to add a little bit of decisiveness to say, okay, three years, I’ve given myself enough time. This isn’t three weeks or three months. So three to six months, you’re probably getting to the spot where you have enough data where you can learn to make a pivot. And pivoting is hard because you might not know what to pivot to. So in that particular case, I would just take a time out, use my judgment and say, I’m still committed to trading and making money, but what I’ve been doing here to for hasn’t been working. How do I know? Well, my account isn’t growing. I might have to refund my account or add new funds over time in order to keep things going.
Again, I’ll go back and mention too, I don’t know who the audience is or who this might help in that if your account is underfunded, you might feel like you always have to take the risk off because even having a micro contract overnight just seems like it’s just too much risk for you. Your account is probably underfunded at that point because if you think about what the standard deviation is, looking at the daily chart of the price moves and your account, you can’t take a one or two standard deviation move against you. You don’t have enough money. And so when you’re trying to trade underfunded, it puts you in a bad mindset where you’re automatically, you start with nothing but bad habits as far as I can see. So I would tend to say, save your money and get to the spot where you could look and see, okay, well what happened? If I would have a five standard deviation move against me, what would that mean to my capital? Another way to look at it would be to convert your trading strategies to options, right? Because at least at that point you know what your max losses are. But anytime you’re trying to take small gains in a short window of time, I don’t know where the financial abundance is that. So again, without being a judge, I would just say, look at your behavior and conjugate that with what your goals are.
You know what I mean? So you could also apply that to your life because you’re the pilot and the navigator, you get to determine how you want things to go. You get to design your life the way you want it to go. If you’re listening to the voices of your parents or some other person in your head, you might be into people pleasing or caring too much about what other people think about you. I’m luckily not in that space myself. There have probably been times where I’ve heard voices in my head about things, but that’s when I was living somebody else’s life for that brief moment in time. And I quickly came back to center to understand that I get to make the decisions in my life and do things the way I see good and fit. So I’d like you to try to practice that and do that for yourself as well. And this little trick of looking at your self-talk and kind of determining, am I using my judgment or am I being a judge? This can really help you get a step closer to finding a solution, especially when you use your judgment and then reframe things in the positive and in the present tense. I think that’ll help you a lot. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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