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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