Are You Trading For Financial Gain Or Emotional Gain?

Everybody happy Friday. Thanks for being here. I kind of got behind on some of these emails and these comments when I get back. For one, I don’t plan on having plants or anything on the wall. I’ve made too much money in this chair, and I like baseball players. I eat chicken on game day, so none of that’s going to change. I appreciate your comments. If you don’t like the background of the walls, there’s plenty other great YouTube videos for you to watch. You don’t have to watch this one. Chris Bram, I appreciate your comments too. You’re looking at the number of listens. Yeah, I mean, I’m not doing it for that. I don’t believe in likes and van, what we call vanity metrics. When the student is ready, the teacher is there right under the nose. This is the second largest search engine on planet Earth.
So for those who are interested, I’m sure they’ll find me one way or another. Again, the reason I started doing this was to kind of give back when, because I promised myself if I had any bit of success, I would give back to the community in ways that I wasn’t afforded because we didn’t have that type of environment. There were books and there were people, and the people were really greedy with their information. They didn’t want share anything. And so I kind of do it stealing an idea from Napoleon Hill thinking grow rich. If I put any abundance out into the universe, I know it’s going to come back. It may not come back from anybody who’s watching this, but I got karma out the wazoo. My Karma Bank is overflowing, right? And there’s no fault and there’s no fear of default mat. I think I’m saying your name right.
I appreciate you writing in a couple times here. This was a quote under your inner world versus your outside world. The second one, there was two parts to it, and the quote is, after a while, there is no excitement with he’s, I guess he’s mat, I dunno if it’s a man or a woman. They’re quoting me saying, after a while there is no excitement with making money and there’s no feeling of burn with losing money. He’s probably talking about paper trading. So what’s the point of still doing trading if it doesn’t evoke any feeling anymore? So you know, might want the emotional win more than the financial win. Most of the pro traders have an edge and they have a discipline and they have a process, and I don’t want to say they’re addicted, but their main goal is to follow their process. They’re powerless over the results of any one particular trade.
So they’re not emotionally invested. They don’t fall to pieces when they lose and they’re not clicking their heels as if they just cured or found a cure for the common cold when they win. Why? Well, because there’s the next trade and what’s the best you can do? Follow your process. There’s no emotion tied to that, right? I don’t fear the market. I don’t, I’m not afraid to win. I’m not afraid to lose. I don’t look forward to losing, so I can become a martyr and get attention from people. I don’t care about winning because I’m not going to go to the internet and gloat about my winners and get screen grabs and show size and all that kind of stuff. That doesn’t mean anything to me. So the point is to have a financial goal that’s going to change your life and follow a system or a set of rules that you’re compatible with that feel good for you that you can execute. Where you have a trading edge, there’s positive expected value, and if you do that thousands and thousands of times, you’ll end up with more money than when you started, right? You’ll have a tax bill too, presumably, but that to me would be a better way to understand that.
But people can trade for a million different reasons, and let me just see if I’m missing anything here. Yeah, I mean, Carlos, anything can go wrong. I want to go back to what I was talking about the other day, about maybe yesterday’s episode. You might be moving your stops and becoming despondent because you want that winner. Maybe because you want to show that winning trade to another person. It’s a long shot, but it could be there as well. Maybe you have a significant other or a spouse who’s certainly mindful of all the time that you’re putting in. This is something that you want to have a conversation about because if you’re in a relationship and you’re living together and there’s a lot of time being spent in and around the trading stuff,
You want to be super clear with your partner that this is going to take a lot of time and a lot of focus. But I would also, and so communicate that with them. Make sure that you’re having an open, clear line of communication because all good relationships have a component of strong, very honest communication. And two, if your partner’s saying you’re not spending enough time, you want to listen to your partner and find some middle ground, because I don’t know if you have a really great relationship that trading is worth putting all of that at risk. If you ask me, I’d say no, but everyone has their own tastes and preferences right? Now. Having said that, I would also encourage you to have balance. So when we do goal setting stuff on the consulting side, we have one personal goal and one business goal because if, first of all, if you have try to set eight goals, you don’t know where to start, which one you going to focus on. So what ends up happening is you really don’t get anything done in any of ’em. You end up being pretty good at knocking things out and getting to the first stage. I saw this written down, I want to read it.
Where did I write it down? Hang on,
Where did I write that down? See, I have too many notebooks. My goal is to consolidate my notebooks. So basically you don’t want to put yourself in a spot where you’re kind of getting really good at getting out of the gates on many, many things, but never really taken any of them home. So you put your blinders on, you have one personal goal. One of those personal goals could be investing in your relationship and having a good balance. I don’t know too many people in the trading world, I don’t really know any who did nothing, but think about the markets 24 7 to the point where they forgot or for had forsaken other things in their lives that were important to them. When you’re working hard and you’re not showing the results, you think putting more hours in can benefit you, right? Because you’re showing the universe that you’re committed and this and that.
But I can’t, don’t know that that’s true. I think you have to put in quality work, but that’s a derivative. It’s a D Y D X over time, and I don’t think 18 hour days is the way to go, even when you’re just trying to figure out and you’re just starting. You need to have some competence. But I look at it this way. Look at Jimmy Page, guitar player for Led Zeppelin. Guy wrote some amazing hooks. I would consider him a sloppy guitar player compared to many of the guitar players that I know. But he’s phenomenally musical, right? He’s written some of the most memorable lines ever to be written. But as far as comparing him to say Clapton in terms of technique, I’d say there’s a fairly big difference. I love both of them myself, and I know every Led Zeppelin song, acoustic or electric, so watch my behavior.
I’m not making any digs on Jimmy Page, and I can play in the different guitar tunings that he’s played in some of the opening on your stop, and that’s the way I can know some of those open tunings, they’re a little trickier, not in standard tuning, but you want to have balance, right? And so the way to do that is to make sure that’s part of your time blocking. Here’s when you’re going to put your work in, and here’s where you’re going to turn off, and you might have to put in 30 minutes of transition, meditation, yoga, going for a walk, doing something, getting out of the house, not spending any time with your significant other, nor the markets just to clear your brain. If you work at a remote office and have to go home, you’ve got more than enough time put on your favorite song.
Do what is, do whatever it is that you have to do to put yourself in a good state and then enjoy the benefits of being in a great relationship. So again, I remember the days where I was facing into the books reading because I didn’t have anything else to do, and I was looking for a God shot. I was looking for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, you got to focus more on this and remove this, but they weren’t there. I had to do it all myself. And so it took a lot of time, and there were times in my life where I didn’t have that balance, and if I could go back, I would turn it around because ultimately, intentions equal results, and if it’s your intention to be successful at this, you’ll get there. I can’t you when, and you can’t tell yourself when either.
You only lose in my mind’s eye when you quit. You see, that’s my belief system. So do the best you can and keep in mind that to learn any type of process that’s new, this is something that you’ve never done before. There’s no parallel maybe in your life. There wasn’t one from me either. So you’re really carving something at a stone that never existed before. So give yourself a bit of a break. I know people, you should see some of the comments that I get via email because people are too, I don’t know what they’re feeling, may be embarrassed, ashamed, or frustrated. They don’t even want to put them attached to their name on a public channel, but people literally beat the living crap out of themselves over this stuff, and it’s, to me, it’s not worth it. You don’t want to do anything that’s going to affect your quality of life.
Even if you think that trying to learn trading is going to eventually give you a higher quality of life, I promise you, if that’s your mindset, you will find something else after your first X, Y, Z financial goal is hit to obsess about and to drive yourself crazy. You don’t want to be a martyr at the end of the day. You want to have a balance, because again, if you act intentionally in intentions, equal results, and if you can marry your behavior with your belief system, you’ll absolutely get where you want to be. Enjoy the process, because once you figure out your model, whatever that trading model is, right, whether you’re a discretionary chart reader, whether you’re, you’re full on systematic trader, you know this and that, you’ll get where you want to go. It’ll take some time. I would definitely enjoy the journey and enjoy the process.
I think more times than not, I did do that. But I do remember there were times where I was just so frustrated that I was putting in long hours, I was putting in times on the weekend, and I missed out on a lot of other things in life that I could have been out with my friends having fun, maybe traveling more. I didn’t really travel all that much for my first 15 years, which if I did it all over again, I probably would’ve changed. But at any rate, that’s my message. I appreciate y’all being here. Please like and subscribe and let me see.
Please like and subscribe and click the bell thing. I hope you have a great weekend. Take some time off. If you’re in a bit of a rut, take some time off. The markets aren’t going anywhere. Clear your head. It’s very, very hard to do anything very, very well when you’re frustrated or you want some kind of revenge trade, right? So go, there you go. Now I got it. You know, don’t want to be in that kind of mindset. It’s not really good for you. This isn’t personal. The market doesn’t know that you’re trading. It’s not trying to beat your head in. It is testing you to see how disciplined you can be. That’s for damn sure, but it’s not. You don’t want to, again, personify your p and l. There’s another episode on that. Anyway, I hope you had a good week and you have some fun plans for the weekend. If you’re in a grind, take some time off, put some space between you and the market. Come back Monday. If you need more time, come back the week after that. The markets will be here. They’re not going anywhere. These are not the easiest markets to trade, right? There’s a lot of overhang, so just be very, very patient and be practical with what you’re doing. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you next week.

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