Everybody, Michael Martin. So I got a great email from somebody who wanted clarification on something and it was on a line that I use a lot, and that is the feelings that you don’t want to feel have as much control over you as the ones that you do. Now, I didn’t come up with that line. I’m certain it was probably Ed Seko or somebody along those lines, but it struck me as something that makes a lot of sense. And the question was like, can you explain it a little bit more? See how does it manifest in someone’s day? Well, I know somebody who likes the action of the markets, has a good feel, but doesn’t like doing all the front end work, which to me is really the trading part. The trading part is more about preparation. The execution can be automated or delegated. So to me, trading happens when you’re doing your research and you’re getting prepared for the next day.

That to me is where the money is, and he doesn’t like that part of it as much. So he constantly finds ways to kind of say, well, I’m going to allocate from five to 8:00 PM or six to 9:00 PM every night and look at my charts, look at my setups, look at whatever, and there’s always a ballgame on or something to distract him. There’s phone calls coming in, he’s getting pings. And so what ends up happening is the quality of his work is low because he is not focused. So then what happens is how does that play out? Well, the feeling of the feeling that you don’t want to feel has a big impact on you. He doesn’t like the feeling of missing out on the game. He wants to see the action. He wants to be able to talk with his friends about the game, doesn’t want to miss any very important text messages or dms or pings that you get.

And so he lets that into his world. So the quality of his analysis is lower than it could be if he had put his full focus in. So then what happens is the next day, and it doesn’t happen day after day, but there’s oftentimes days that’ll go by where there’s a lot of stuff that’s right in his wheelhouse that he missed out on. So then what happens? He gets frustrated. So now you have a situation where because of the reluctance to do the work on the front end isn’t getting done that the payoff, the emotional payoff for that is frustration. Now for other people it might be anger, aggravation, who knows? Doesn’t matter to me what it is, but it could be anything that evokes you, a strong feeling that you think you don’t want to feel. So I went back and I said, I think if maybe you did, you’re in California markets close at right around, well now it’s about one o’clock when I’m recording this. So the markets close locally at one. A lot of time between the close for equity markets, some of

The futures markets are already closed, but you have so much time, you could go grab a bite, go for a walk, take a quick power nap, come back here at two o’clock, come back to the desk, and then still have a couple of hours to do the preparation for the next day long before it kind of gets to that five to six so that he can have the best of all the worlds. But the way it’s set up right now is to frustrate the guy to miss opportunities. So I’ve missed plenty of opportunities. It’s not the end of the world. What you don’t want to do is make it a habit of missing out on these opportunities when you know had the time to put the work in to put the names on your screen and to have your wishlist set up for the next day.

Now, whether you do that the night before or the morning of if you’re a shorter term player, again, doesn’t matter to me. But the idea is, is that the analysis the work has to get done, and you have to be in tune with that work because that’s also what starts getting you in the mood over the feeling tone of being in that trade and then being able to execute it, right? Because that’s the whole key. We could sit, excuse me, and analyze this stuff forever, but ultimately we get paid to execute. So that’s where the money’s at. And to me, it starts with the preparation. And if you don’t like the preparation, then you got to farm it out or find somebody else to do it, because that to me is where you harvest your ideas, some of which end up becoming very profitable trades. So that’s one example.

Another example real quick is super simple. You don’t like the feeling of doing all this analysis. You finally put on the trade, you’re in the trade. Maybe it’s up slightly, but not enough because now you have all this judgment of how the trade should have performed once you put it on and you don’t want to get knocked out of the trade. So you forsake putting in a definitive protective stop on your capital and you’re going to use a mental stop. So then that just opens up the door for so many other feelings. So ultimately the feeling that you don’t want to feel controls your behavior, but it also tends to invite other feelings that you also know that you don’t want to feel. So you have to kind of judge them, be the judge and the jury and say to yourself, well, which ones do you want to feel?

Because if you don’t want to put the work in ahead of time, then for me it’s like I don’t want to entertain you being frustrated because that’s an easy fix. You can put the work in, and if you don’t want to do the work, that’s cool, but then don’t bitch about it because now you’re playing a victim and you set yourself up for that. Same thing with stops. It’s like you don’t get to choose how the thing is going to move once you’re in it long or short, it’s life on life’s terms. So if it moves in your favor, great, but you still have to put your stop in. And if it moves enough in your favor, you can keep adjusting it up. But saying to yourself, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to get stopped, and worse, I don’t want to get stopped and have it rebound and go back up, so therefore I’m not going to put the stop in again.

So your unwillingness to feel that feeling of say, frustration or aggravation or whatever it is for you, or that you’ve wasted your time on all the front end analysis only to put a trade on and have it lose money and knock you out in 15 minutes, I understand all of that. But again, we talked about it a million times. Your frustration or your aggravation can turn into Deon, right? So just be aware of that. Yes, the feelings that you don’t want to feel have as much control of you as the ones that you do, but in my experience, until you’re willing to feel all of your feelings, the ones that you don’t want to feel and you want to avoid, they end up putting you in a spot where you have to invite other feelings that I don’t think you’re going to want to feel either. So that’s why it’s important to just put your orders in, do the work, and try to figure out what are these feelings trying to tell you? If you don’t want to do your preparation for several hours, then change the time of the day that you do it or break it up, do a little, and then do another half at another time.

But either way, it’s something to look at because I think it’s true in life, not just in trading. But at any rate, that’s all I have for you today. Please like and subscribe to show. If you leave a comment. I see everything. I’ll reply if you want to suggest a topic for the show. I’m happy to investigate new topics that I’m not thinking of myself. But otherwise, thank you very much for being here, folks. I will see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody. Thanks for being here today. So before, I forgot to say it yesterday, but if you would please consider liking and subscribing to the show. It means a lot. It helps YouTube understand who’s liking the show and what messages are resonating with them, and then it actually helps expand the audience. Whereas the podcast platforms are happy to host your show. They don’t really do a lot to help you grow the show, and so YouTube does a much better job. Plus, I think there’s times when I’m going to be able to illustrate stuff. You want to be able to see it on camera. So we talked about being able to focus on one thing and excel at it. And for me, that started with the process of reducing the chores and the tasks and the studies of course, because I had been inspired by folks who could trade any acid class long or short, but that takes a long time to get to that spot.

So by focusing on one thing and excelling at it, that’s where you could also obviously develop your edge and then you’d want to trade when you can replicate that edge over and over and over again. But I think I would be remiss if I didn’t say this is one of the reasons why it’s very, very difficult for a person to be a successful trader because all the feelings that you feel in your body are fight or flight and trading has a way of pushing your buttons to make you feel like you’re under constant attack. You can self-doubt, right? You can have no confidence. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m afraid to put on this trade. I see other people are going long that e many, should I do it? And if so, is now a good time? Is this a good price to do it?

So when you have all those feelings running through your brain, those aren’t necessarily ones of that could build your confidence. Those are the ones that kind of undermine you and let you negotiate with yourself that you’re not going to enter the market with stops. You’re just going to buy spontaneously out of emotion using market orders. You’re going to use a mental stop to protect your capital, not actually put an order in. And then there’s, right, so there’s the breaking of those bad habits, and then there’s the doing of it every day because it’s one thing to get it done for one day, which is great. I mean, so many people have an issue getting it done in any one particular day, but it’s when you can do it day after day, week after week that you’ve developed that discipline. And I think that’s when people will kind of know that they’ve kind of made, it really comes down to your behavior more than the results of your behavior. Of course, you have to make money, but when I was eliminating those other asset classes, like my days, I freed up a lot of energy. I freed up a lot of time, so I didn’t have to spend time trying to hunt through options trades. I could

Use that time and that mental energy, which is hard enough to come by into things where I knew I had some skill and that allowed me to develop the skill even further. And so that’s why I think when you think about developing your craft and really getting good at it, you want to try to specialize as best you can. Give you an example. I know people that trade opening ranges on stock index features for the first 90 minutes, and that’s their trading day. And if they don’t see what they’re looking to see in that window of time, they turn off the computer, come back tomorrow. I also know people who are really good at trading the clothes, and that’s what they do. They just look at whatever market they’re looking at. Could be sugar, could be stocks, could be gold and silver, could be stock index futures, but they’re really good at knowing how to close trade the clothes.

Then there’s other guys and gals who look at scenarios where you have extreme overboard or oversold conditions, and they’re good at timing a mean reversion, for example, using stocks or options for example, or futures, commodity futures as well. And so it takes all kinds. You can really figure this out for yourself and figure out what one do you want to excel at? Which one come na, which comes natural to you? Which of these feels good? And then when you kind of look at your results, do you realize, am I doing this because it feels good, but I’m not getting results? Or am I doing this because I have a bit of a knack? Then you go through that stage, which is frustrating because it also takes time. Again, why is it hard to become a successful trader is because all of these feelings, they don’t meet your needs.

You want to have success and you want to have it now. You want some sign from heaven that onto something. And it’s always life on life’s terms. And what happens is people tend to want to gravitate towards things that have more certainty because when you’re trading, you don’t get a paycheck. It’s really you and your ability. So all those forces and those pressures can play on you in such a way that they can actually stop you dead in your tracks and freeze you. So that’s why it starts with the goal setting and the planning. Where is it that you want to be in six months? How do you see your life being different from where it is right now? And then can you set up daily behavior that you can execute a little bit on day after day after day? Manifest the abundance, be prepared, be ready to win. Envision where you

Want to, and then despite whatever you’re feeling or whatever you’re going through, just focus on the abundance that, hey, it doesn’t look pretty. It’s awfully messy and ugly, but I’m doing it and I’m doing it every day, and I take solace in the fact that I’m doing it every day and I’m not quitting. So in conclusion, I would say focus on the process. Don’t necessarily look at the results. You can always gear down your risk and trade and risk just a few bucks. I’ve read stories where there’s certain prop trading firms where they literally gave the person a $10 limit on the day. So if they can do it, so can you, right? But just realize that it’s very difficult to have staying power if your discipline’s all over the place. Usually folks, like I said, they find or they gravitate towards one type of setup, one type of a trade, one type of a timeframe, maybe even one instrument or one asset class could be tech stocks, it could be the softs in the future’s market.

Doesn’t matter to me what it is, but that’s where you might find your edge, is where you think you have that natural ability, right? So be open minded that way. Anyway, like I said, please like and subscribe, leave a comment. If you want to reach out through the blog and give me a topic that you’d like me to cover, I’d be happy to check it out, see if I have anything halfway intelligent to say. If not, I’ll say so. I don’t have all the answers, I only have some of them. I appreciate you being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody. Happy Monday. So I got a good email about how to manifest abundance. Now, unfortunately, this could be a four hour video, which I don’t have the battery live for. I got some new cameras there that are super high end. So I think the abundance for me can come from when.

To me, it starts with the discipline of everything. It starts with, okay, where you are right now is point A, point B is where you want to get to. Oftentimes you have to take steps towards that point B and not even know what you’re doing and kind of figure it out as you go. That’s the scary part. But the good news is if you can do that shoulder well for you in your future, because most folks overthink things and they can’t take that step. And so to manifest the abundance, you have to have a sense of imagination where you can figure in your mind or create that environment that you don’t currently have physically, but that you want spiritually, for example. And then it’s comes down to sticking to, excuse me, your discipline. Because in the discipline as Jocko, Jocko willing, excuse me, likes to say the discipline equals the freedom.

I think that’s true in that you can take solace no matter how any day or trading week went, you can take solace in the fact that at each and every instance, you just followed your rules, that’s the best you can do, the outcome you’re powerless over. And so when you can take solace in that, it helps you build your confidence. And I’ve said before that once you instill confidence in somebody, there’s no no stopping them. There’s really no stopping what they can do. They can carry themselves great distances that they might not even thought about when you feel them full of confidence. Now you can do that for yourself when you just follow your rules and keep things very, very simple. When things get super complicated or you start taking flyers, there’s a part of a maturation process that you go through where you see, okay, I can do that because there’s no one stopping me, but I know I can’t fool myself.

And so I think one of the ways to manifest abundance then is to stick to your discipline and repeat that process day after day. Think about what the end goal is and then behave the way that you want to as you go to achieve that goal. Then to me, the abundance will show up because you’re not undermining yourself by doing things that aren’t part of your bigger plan. Obviously, putting those plans together is a lot of work in the one-on-one. For example, coaching where we typically have weekly Zoom calls that can last 60 to 90 minutes. I’m still going to do three or four hours of work in preparation for the client before we even get on the phone, and that’s my end. I’m the person guiding it. So for the individual, for the student, the client, it takes a lot of time to get clear, but my experience is the folks that are willing to do that end up behaving better because they know what behaviors they have to exhibit to hit their goals, and they know what behaviors they have to put by the wayside or not shine the light on so much because although it might feel good, it doesn’t necessarily add up to profitable trading.

Good question. Awfully difficult to answer it in a short video here. But those are my thoughts on how you can start to manifest abundance in your life is to start with your plan. Stick to it. Marry your discipline up with your behavior every day. Don’t go outside the boundaries of your discipline and then watch as you keep your losses small and you let your winners run. That’s kind of how it all works in from a 30,000 foot view. Anyway, please like and subscribe to show the channel. You could leave a comment below That would help. Or if you’d prefer to reach out to me privately, you can do that through the site. Suggest a topic. I’ll be happy to cover it here. Appreciate you. I’ll be in here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey folks. Happy Friday. Another place where I see people leaving opportunity for ajak things that make them feel crazy is when they don’t have a set plan for the full trade. So professional traders will know this probably doesn’t come as a shock. They’re confident in that they know what their edge is, they know how to express that edge. They might even have it and focus on, say like the E mini for example. The course that I’m doing with Victor Sprank is going to deal just with day trading and swing trading setups in stock index futures and otherwise, which is certainly a certain style. But, and around that, those people are very prepared. They know where they want to add the risk. They know how much risk they want to add. They know where they’re going to get out if they’re wrong and if nothing else, they know how to assess the situation as they’re making money.

Do they sell a piece, raise the stop to break even? Do they just hit a price level and puke out the whole position? Do they do it more like me where I don’t lift any or remove any risk, but I do adjust the stop because I want to piecemeal my way into a trade to get to my optimum size. Different shapes, different flavors for everybody, but one of the things that I hear from a lot of folks, especially when they pinged me on social media or they write via email, is that they put on a trade. It started making money and they didn’t put in their protective stop because the thing didn’t make enough money, didn’t go down enough, but they were at a spot where they didn’t want to remove the trade because they were focused on the promise of it. And those are like, I think I’ve talked about it before.

The four worst words in real estate are like five worst words, honey, I love this place because now the person’s emotionally invested in the home and has nothing to do with finance anymore. The worst thing you can do in the trading market is a similar expression. It’s like, well, let’s just wait and see. Let’s see how it pans out. That’s not what a pro would do. A pro might be mindful in watching the market activity to go down so that he or she or they can apply their known trading tactics that are congruent with where their trading edge is, but they’re never <laugh>, excuse me. They’re never sitting back saying, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m just going to wait and see and then I’m going to act. There’s always a plan to say, if nothing else, I’ve got my protective stop in the marketplace. Bottom line behavior. This thing could never run away from me and hurt me because the stop is going to knock me out. Now, there might be key inflection points in the move for that particular trading style where the trader might adjust their stop above, right, raise it, but you don’t want to negotiate with your stops. If you’re down in the neighborhood where the name isn’t working out and you’re getting close, oftentimes you can just offset the trade for a smaller loss than the

One that you were willing to take because that’s a smart thing to do. Another thing you could do is deploy a time stop and say, okay, normally when I put on these trades, they work out within three minutes, and if that’s not the case, then the trade goes. If you’re a longer term trader, you might say, I put on a trade and it works out between one and two days. I start showing money. This thing’s kind of been plus or minus 50 cents, so I’m just going to offset it. But ultimately, you don’t want to find yourself in a place of complacency because preparedness is like, I know my list. Here are the ways I can express my edge. Here’s where I add the risk to my portfolio, and here is definitively how I remove that risk. There’s nothing left to guesswork, there’s no deferring the feelings that I don’t want to feel because you can only manage risk in the ever-evolving moment of right now.

I can’t be in a trade neither, plus or minus any amount of money and then be like, well, I’m just going to figure it out along the way. Again, when you’re beginning, you might be in that space. It’s a little more difficult, but if you want to align your behavior with a role model or somebody who as a pro, I guarantee you that’s very, very close to what they’re doing, they’re always thinking about how do I manage risk? Because if I don’t manage the risk, it manages me and then my life is in total chaos because I’m constantly looking at the market. Forget for feedback. If my names are up, I feel good. If my names are on, I feel bad. That’s not the pro way to go about it. So be prepared. Always have an action plan and know what you’re going to do ahead of time.

That can give you the sense of confidence that you need to carry you day after day, week after week. Anyway, thanks so much for all the comments and the feedback. I appreciate that. Please like and subscribe to the show. If you leave a comment, I’ll respond. If you want to reach out through the blog and give me an idea for a topic to cover on the show, I’ll be glad to check it out. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a lot of experience that I could speak to. So anyway, hope you had a great week, folks, and you have fun plans for the weekend. I look forward to some time off, and I’ll see you Monday. Take care.

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So where can we find examples in our lives when we are inviting feelings in our lives that are trying to communicate with us, and sometimes we don’t listen to them? Well, in the trading space, if you’re forcing things and you’re not trading with your edge, which admittedly can be in the beginning because you’re trying to figure all that out. That’s why it’s important to take very rigorous notes on everything from the setup. And if you look back several months, I did this long episode on a Wednesday about all the feelings that you feel throughout the entire process. You know, have your preparedness where you’re doing your research and your preparation. There’s a feeling that goes with that. There’s a feeling that goes with, you’re going to bed at night with your game plan in your brain or not if you don’t have that game plan.

So there’s a different feeling for that, knowing that you have to do it in the morning. Maybe it’s excitement, maybe it’s anxiety. Then there’s the morning of the person who wakes up. Has their plan all set? What do they feel like in the morning as they’re looking to engage with the markets? What is the shorter term person who is looking for their edge the day of, or looking for scenarios where they can affect their age, their edge, the day of, the morning of, right? So then you put your orders in. There’s the feeling tone that goes with that. How does that reward you or make you feel emotionally? Then there’s the managing the trade part where you added risk to your portfolio, long or short. Now you’ve got to manage the risk. There’s a feeling that goes with that. Then there’s the after, right? You offset the trade for a gainer loss of say, in the day or the next few days.

Does it matter if you’re a day trader or a short-term swing trader? So there’s all those feelings and if you line those feelings up, you have your emotional model. So what’s one thing that you can do to tidy that up and to kind of listen to what your feelings are trying to teach you? Well, couple things. If you’re a short-term player, you might consider having ideas or at least a theme, right? They don’t have to be trade ideas, but what’s the theme? Have the theme going the night before so that as you watch whatever financial news, or if you’re look, you got a stream of a discord or something like this, you’re not becoming emotionally invested in the fact that you might not have a trade idea for that particular day. So then you hotwire your system and you put on a trade because somebody is speaking about it on television, and you need to put on a trade that typically doesn’t work out. So you have to listen to what your feelings are trying to talk to you about at that moment in time. You can basically say, Hey, I have to do more preparation, or I have to expand the names that I’m watching. I have to expand my screener to include different capitalization because I’m limited to the number of names that I

Have. I feel like I’m missing out on opportunities. There’s nothing wrong with missing opportunities. But what you don’t want to do is act out of emotion, because that typically might solve a need in the very, very short run, but it’s typically not a positive one from a financial standpoint. So at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you’re prepared for what you want out of the market, both financially and emotionally. Another area where you could find yourself having animosity towards the markets or anxiety or otherwise, any feeling really is, for example, when you don’t use protect, you don’t use stops. Pro traders will see what their levels are and they’ll try to execute around those levels oftentimes by putting in, say, a buy stop above the market within a certain spot where they want to acquire and add risk to their portfolio.

Other folks try to sit there and do it in real time and put in market orders, and oftentimes they’re pushed beyond where they want it to get in because there were there stock ahead. So you might consider using your stops because it’s a form of discipline, and ultimately discipline really pays off very, very well in trading because it stops you from taking flyers. So you could enter your buy stop to enter again, process your feelings around paranoia and people running stops and then trapping you in this and that for the handful of times that will ever happen, you will have made so much more money by being disciplined and putting in your buy stops to get into the market super fast and relying on the technology. It might also include a step before you put in your buy stop, and that is to put an alert on your marketmind, and that says, okay, if you’re looking for the stock to be at like say 102, for you to start adding risk, you put an alert on the market minder at say 1 0 1, 1 0 1 50, so that once the price trades added through that level and alert will go off and say, aha, we’re kind of in the neighborhood now of where we might want to add risk to the portfolio.

So then I can go in and add my stop protective stops. Kind of go without saying as well, you need to protect your capital. No one wants to lose money, but the best thing that you can do is learn how to manage a book of stops every day. You want to add risk long, those are by stops. Once you get filled, you automatically know where your protective sale stops are, and then you’ll have a rule that says, once I start making money at a certain level, then I’m going to adjust my protective stop to a minimum of break even. So this way, I can’t necessarily lose, I didn’t make enough money to take it off the table, but I still adjusted my stop to protect my capital, and that’s a pro move. So those are just a couple of examples of how you can listen to the market feedback and get closer and closer to being prepared, being able to trade and execute your edge. Please like and subscribe to the show, appreciate you being here. Leave a comment or you can reach out through Martin Chronicle you want. If you want to suggest a topic that I haven’t covered, I’m happy to help. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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