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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Hey, everybody. Happy Friday. Today would probably be a shorter lesson than normal just because I think I’ve said everything that I want to say. But there is one thing that I wanted to speak on as a follow on from yesterday, and that is if your research is poor or if you don’t really know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it, right? It sounds like one of those peppered farm commercials. Stocks, equities are secular. Commodities are cyclical. Both can trend if you’re looking for names that are winning, one way to find the names is to research and see which sectors are hot. The sectors are hot because of the cumulative effect of the names in the sector.
You could avoid things like going to, here’s something to do that’s really stupid. Go to the worst sector and then try to find quality names or names that you’re familiar with there, because again, you think cheaper prices are more value. You’re not going to make money that way until you have to wait too long. Finance applied Microeconomics has one tenant. Well, there’s a couple, but one of the most important is cash has time value. So if you’re trading, not investing, look, if you want to put some of your money into an investment and you want to buy straw hats in winter, that’s one thing that’s not trading though. So keep that in mind. Cash has time value. You have to turn a dollar into $2, you see? So don’t take this ideology of buying straw hats in the winter and try to apply that into the trading world.
Now you’re mixing religions, right? So that’d be like a Catholic going to five masses a day. You could do it, I suppose, if they’re even available in the same time zone, but I’m praying like a Muslim. But the idea being is you can shortcut. I don’t want to say hack because I don’t like the idea of hacking. I think you have to put in the work. You have to act intentionally, but there might be names that you don’t even know of. You don’t know what the companies do, which is fine. If you’re not a fundamentalist, what do you care? Anywhere? You’re looking for waves to surf and there’s thousands and thousands of companies aside from the seven dwarfs that are the darlings of today, you can’t get hung up in that, right? We had the four horsemen, you had the fangs. Those are all just marketing shit to keep you ratcheted in, to entertain you.
And I guarantee you there’ll be more. Someone wrote in, I don’t want to point out their name, but they talked about they’re losing money in crypto. Well, the thing is that it’s very much out of favor. So when you’re a fan boy, I think is the expression of anything. Could be sugar, could be Nvidia, could be trading zero days to expiration options like to meet those can become sucker betts because you’ve lost your objectivity because of what you think of what’s going to happen and you want to be part of that. That’s fine for investing. But if the sector like crypto is in the toilet, it’s okay to stay away for a while. Again, why cash has time value. Don’t tell me you’re trying to trade and you don’t know the basic tenants of finance, and I’m not picking on you. Maybe it didn’t occur to you, but that’s what we’re doing, right?
That’s why you put money to risk, even as an investor, which is a trader with no exit strategy is to outperform cash. There’s cash as inflation, and so you need to get a rate of return that’s at least in line with inflation else. You lose your wealth, you lose your purchasing power. And for the folks that we talk to who have eight, nine figures of wealth, they know their quality of life is very high, but they don’t want to see 150 million in today’s dollars. Only have the purchasing power of 75 million in the years to come. Why? Well, because the rule of 72 works. When you think about inflation as well, how long would it take you to lose half of your purchasing power? So you can think about that. So look for the best sectors and then call up the charts of the companies in that sector. They might not be sectors that you go to. They might not have anything to do with ai. I don’t have any positions in crypto, so maybe it’s going to bounce, maybe it’s going to come back. Maybe all that smart contract stuff, it seems so super nerdy and technical and interesting, but again, if we can’t describe how it’s going to help mainstream America right here, right now, then who caress about how cool it is? It’s like a 1974 pet rock. It’s kind of cool technology and maybe it has applications, but my goodness,
If the sector’s not moving, don’t try to find the high flyer in the worst sector, you’re better off finding the dog in the best sector. That’s how Julian Robertson and some of these folks did their equity pair trades where they were long short, they went to the best sector and found the best names and went long. They found the ones that were weekly performing in the best sector and they took some of the vol and the sting out of their portfolio by actually selling those short. So you can kind of borrow from that and make it your own. Go to the best sectors, find the best names, go to consumer staples, for example, and look and see what’s moving there. Go to any other chip making is kind of attached to ai, but find something that seems esoteric to you, something that you don’t know anything about. Why? Well, again, because you’re not trading like a fundamentalist, and if that hits you right between the eyes because you’re suckered into this AI stuff, again, you have to be promiscuous as a trader. You can’t get suckered in and fall in love with the reflection of the N V D A ticker symbol.
You have to be objective. You’ll do a lot better if you don’t try to focus on one particular thing because the magic or your feel might come from a security that you’re not looking at and you’re only going to know from experimentation. How do I know? Well, because what I did, so I’m just trying to give you some objective feedback here. You don’t necessarily have to like it. And again, I’m not saying your girlfriend’s got a big fat ass. It’s not the point here. The goal is to get you to think differently If you’re struggling. Sometimes you can’t see the fire when you’re standing right on top of it. And that’s the goal here, is to help people in a way that I couldn’t get the help when I was starting out. They were unwilling to. They didn’t want to give me the time of day.
So if you’re struggling again, you have to start doing different behavior. That’s really the point of the story this week is focus your on intentions on what it is that you really, really want, and then understand the nature of the instruments that you’re trying to trade and the cyclicality of commodities and the secularity of equities that at least put you in the right neighborhood to find the names that are working. They might not be names that you hear on tv. They might not even have a big following on Twitter or X now or StockTwits, because when you can find those gems, and that comes straight out of Bruce Kaner in the first market Wizards, when you can get ahead of the curve and find something where the fundamentals and the technicals line up and you could be one of the first 10 people in line, everybody else has to pay you an admission ticket to get into that game. Again, going back to Monday or Tuesday’s episode, that’s how you can really get into something. Probably what will end up being lower prices. That’s not necessarily intention. Then everyone else has to buy that thing before they catch on. Then it gets caught up in the media. Maybe it becomes a media darling. That’s how you can buy a stock at 20 and have it end up being 80, right? So appreciate everyone’s comments and feedback. Appreciate y’all being here. I hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll see you on Monday.

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Absence of hard work. I think your self-talk probably sucks. You see, because what ends up happening is when you get into that spot where you are grinding and you know that you want to be a trader, you know that you want to trade better. It doesn’t matter where you are in your career. When you haven’t put the time in, you kind of know it. You see, and when that happens, you can fall into this thing of, see, this always happens to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when I start thinking that way, I quickly stop and go and start saying things in the positive. Because if you focus on what you don’t have and you keep saying that to yourself, in my mind’s eye, you’re going to keep getting more of what you don’t have then. So if you don’t like a certain situation and you haven’t put the hard work, and then your emotional response is like, see, this always happens to me, or Why does this always happen to me?
It’s an endless loop question first of all, and there’s no real answer to those and you’re going to get more of the behavior that puts you in that spot because if you keep doing it, again, I’m not a psychologist, but there’s something that’s pleasing for you. I had mentioned one point in time where people can sabotage themselves by taking small gains and small losses and go on and on like that for years because it puts certainty to an uncertain situation or probabilistic outcomes. So the first thing that you can do if you want to get better is what are your intentions, right? Focus your work on your intentions and then act intentionally. If you are constantly pumping other people for their trading ideas, you’re going to go through a lot of people, right? I mean, because the pros don’t really talk about it. I don’t.
Anyway, maybe some do. I guess it depends where you work. Maybe if you’re on a trading desk, there’s that kind of environment. I always kind of kept my own business to myself and I always reciprocated by not asking other people either. I just generally don’t care. So if you’re having trouble finding trades, there’s a lot of services out there that can help you jumpstart. If you’re a chart reader and you want to just do it yourself, look for the things that are trending up. Call up a six month daily chart and look for something that’s the low is in the lower left corner and the high is in the top right corner and then back it out and see where we are in the greater scheme of things. Don’t get anchored and think like, okay, it was here, now it’s here. I’ve missed a trade. Sometimes those things are just getting starting. I mean, it’s only six months of data.
A lot of great things can happen. I mean, think about it. If you put on a trade right now, there is a possibility that you could still have it on coming through the holiday season at the end of the year. So you get what you think about in many ways. And so think intentionally. Think about, again, we talked about how to make more money. We talked about adjusting your stops and staying in the trades. You can make that an intention so that as you start looking for trades, look for the things that are already up quite a bit. What happens is people were like, oh, the things up 50%. I missed the trade. It can’t go up anymore. Well, if it’s going to go up 200%, it has to have gone up 50% ahead of time. Do you think the folks who had Nvidia at a hundred knew that it was going to trade up to whatever it traded up to 500 something?
Everyone likes to say that they could predict things after the fact, but in my experience, they’re usually just full of shit anyway. No one can really predict what’s going on out there. They can have a sense, but in order to call it exactly the way it unfolds is fantastically difficult. Now, look what happened with, well, actually, I don’t want to get into it. Focus your intentions on what you actually want and then use that as part of your self-talk. Even if you don’t have any evidence of it showing up, you start to condition your brain to see things in a much more abundant way. If all you think about is the frustration that you have because the market is stalled or your trading style is not amenable to what the market is giving you, you still have to be thinking like today is the day.
Remember a couple months ago I talked about every time I’m in this business every day, I know I’m going to win. I might not win today, but I know I’m going to win. I do winning things. That’s my nature, that’s who I am. I’m a winner. That’s what I do, I win. So you have to put yourself in that mindset, and that is going to require some mental growth. For those of you who are small traders or who are taking small gains, I think you can prove it mathematically that if you take small gains and small losses that you’re going to be that person for a long time unless you can find another way to endow your account. You have to focus your intentions on working hard but also working smartly. And if you’re not getting the results that you want, something has to change.
You can start with your research and how do you source ideas? Again, there’s plenty of places where you can go free online and they can help you figure out. If you’re just looking at charts, my goodness, you can go to bar chart, you can go to Yahoo Finance and just scroll through every possible name in the s and p 500. You can go through all the names in the nasdaq. I mean, there’s only five dozen commodities that trade with any kind of liquidity for the most part. So it doesn’t take too long to scroll through those and look for the things that are in uptrends and stop putting limiting beliefs that, well, the thing didn’t, I wonder if you did that and thought like, well, if you could correlate the performance of an instrument with your own performance, you might be holding yourself back on a few levels. In my experience, I know guys who don’t even look at things until they’ve made new 52 week highs and they make bank, you don’t have to worry about catching bottoms.
Cheaper prices don’t mean greater value. We understand that. That’s to me an absolute truth. But for some reason, people like to equate it with getting a baker’s dozen, and in my opinion, it doesn’t exist in the markets that way. You can think how you want to think. I’m not here to call your girlfriend ugly, but in my experience, when things are going on sale, so to speak, and they’re getting cheaper in price, I usually say, well, somebody knows something. I don’t know it, but I’m not going to come in here and try to prove all those people wrong. I know there’s short-term folks who like to fade rallies and stuff. That’s great if you want to collect nickels and dimes, but if you want to make bigger money, you have to be on the side where the power is. You know what I’m saying? Not terribly difficult to catch a 50 cent move on a retracement in an uptrend, right?
The reversals are pretty loud and clear. If you don’t have any idea, go get Victor’s Brando’s book, methods of a Wall Street Master, and you can look about it there. I have a relationship with Victor, but I don’t get anything on his book sales. So it’s a book you should probably have anyway, you don’t need me to tell you that. So look at reversals. You can see reversals at the bottom of the market. They could be pivot points, but usually you’d want to see something consolidate after that. Stage four, wait for it to sell off, then wait for it to consolidate. Sometimes it doesn’t do that, but ultimately you get what you think about, and so I want you to focus on the abundance, and in order to do that, you have to put in the work. If you’re reading charts, then what is it that you’re looking for? Are you looking for patterns? To me, it’s a lot easier to ascertain the trend. Now, if you don’t have a good eye for that, you could always look at a moving average. Like in commodities, it’s popular to use a 20 day exponential moving average. Look at the slope for where
You’re, this is a positive slope. If it’s this way to this way, that’s a positive slope. Obviously, horizontal markets have zero slope, so you don’t want to really trade where there’s consolidation, wait for it to break out on one side or the other. Obviously, if there’s a negative slope, you can be short, but you certainly don’t want to be long, and I would let go of trying to prove other people right or wrong, especially wrong. It doesn’t necessarily pay to try to be the smartest person on the desk. In my opinion. You want to make the most money and trying to be clever is kind of cute for a little bit, but I wouldn’t hire someone like that. Usually that’s tied to ego and people who have big egos can put themselves in positions to lose a lot of money because the goal isn’t necessarily about making money.
That’s the vehicle to get the more important emotional response, which is the public adornment and the likes and the thumbs up and all that other bullshit that you get in social media or what have you. I don’t particularly care for that because I just know pride’s a big banana peel and I’ve gotten blasted too many times over my career to want to make that ego stroke the goal. So that’s like when you start thinking about intentions, what is it that you really want from your trading? How do you want your trading to serve you? When you look at everything that you do over the course of the week, what was the feedback that you got on things? What were the highs and lows? For example, were you humiliated? Was your ego boosted? Did you make or lose money? And think about it in terms of percentages.
No one cares about dollar signs, and once you get to that spot, you’ll have more of a self realization and build your inner voice so that you can grow away from that. Because you have to remember, I always look at when people talk about the rich versus the middle class and they start talking about where the pay is or the compensation, and they use that as the breakpoint. To me, I always thought because I came from middle class, middle class is a form of behavior. It’s not about what you make. The middle class is the middle class because of how they behave and the things that they do with their money.
And I can speak from that where I am from. So if you’re struggling, you have to look at your behavior. What are you doing and what are you not doing? And look at how all of that serves you. How does not doing certain things like taking winners home overnight serve you emotionally? What emotions are you missing out on? What would it feel like if you had a 10 R trade? You really don’t know. You can imagine it, and then act intentionally to get that. You see what I’m saying? So that all kind of comes you, because then you can change your behavior because behavior predicts where you end up, but it all has to start in your mind, what is it that you want? When I ask people, I can tell you this and I’ll look you square in the eye, squarely in the eye.
I’ve had institutional clients who’ve confided in me because I’m in la. I’m not in any of the big cities where there’s traders, so they don’t have to worry about gossip and small talk and me showing up at a gin mill. I really don’t go to bars anyway. I don’t drink. But when you ask them after they’ve achieved a certain level of success, and I think this also ties into the one reason why business business leaders who are at presidents and c e o level start to fail and their colors start to fade, their careers go gray, if you will, is they stop having goals and they stop having personal growth. The single best thing that you can do for yourself, and yet there’s a bit of a conflict of interest, is to find yourself a coach and be accountable. All the biggest winners want to stay on top.
Tiger Woods had three coaches. You see what I’m saying? So you can do what you think is best, but they all act intentionally, acting intentionally and have a clear vision for what you want. And knowing what every action that you take means to you, both financially and emotionally, is a quick way to start figuring out how to pick that lock of success. You see, again, I was really lucky I was kind of born this way, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have to work. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t lose money because man, I’ve lost a lot of money trying to figure things out. Nowadays with the way the market is, I kind of pick my spots and I do as I have to do.
But at any rate, keep that in mind. Intentions, equal results, put that on a post-It note. You’re getting whatever you want at any particular situation, and you usually do it by design. And if you don’t know why you’re doing it, it’s likely because it’s tied up into your subconscious, which guess what is about a third of what we do on the consulting side is helping people actually figure out why do they do what they do when they can’t figure it out? Intellectually, the big hint is that it’s usually because on some level you’re just used to it and it’s probably emotionally appealing because it helps you seek pleasure and oftentimes avoid discomfort. People don’t like discomfort, so they avoid it, but as I’ve said before, sometimes the feelings that you think you want to feel at least intellectually are on the other side of feelings that you’re not willing to go to through your subconscious. Anyway, it’s been a good week. I hope you’re having a good week too. Thanks for being here. Please like and subscribe, click the bell thingy, and if you haven’t already gotten a copy of the Inner Voice Trading Audiobook, you can get that for free at Martin Chronicle. I’ll see you tomorrow. I.

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