Home / TradeRx 2.0 Accountability Program / A note from the TradeRx2.0 course creator

A note from the TradeRx2.0 course creator


Some background information on the program

I say this all the time and I will continue to say it. I am not a trading coach or a self-professed expert at trading. I simply share my experiences and views on things, and you can decide if they make any sense to you. The Trade℞2.0™ program is completely voluntary and not a requirement of being a member of Second Brain/The Intentional Trader trade room.

When I decided to become a trader, money became my main focus in life. It was almost obsessive. I noticed that my mood was dictated by each win or loss of each trade. Losses were tough for me to take. Money I just had a few minutes ago was gone! What if I don’t get it back? What if I had just passed on that trade….I’d still have MY money! 

It didn’t take long to notice that my account was not growing and I couldn’t figure out why. I had the data to suggest that I should be moving forward but my account was flat lining. Then it hit me. I was so worried about giving up something that was mine, I was shying away from some really good trades or exiting early because I was scared of losing MY money. When I didn’t have much to start with, I didn’t really worry about it. But now that I had seen that I might be able to trade full time for a living, then my entire attitude seemed to change without my knowing it. Rather than gaining confidence in my trading I actually started to worry about losing what I had earned. 

Flash forward a few weeks….. I was having a conversation with a trading friend of mine one day. He’d been trading for 27 years and has forgotten more about trading than I will ever know. I asked him how much money he made trading that day. He said he didn’t know…. Huh? …Not know? …. How do you not know? He was pretty lackadaisical and blasé about the whole thing. He said that he looks at his account about once a month but that’s about it. I was floored! I live and die on each trade. How could he not know on each minute of each day how much was in his trade account?

 I didn’t really make much of a big deal about it at the time. And in fact, I thought I had forgotten about it. But apparently it was eating at me and I didn’t know it. I had learned a lesson, but it had not hit my conscious mind yet. It was trying to get there but my preconceived ideas and my fears and frustrations were blocking it. 

It hit me like a ton of bricks out of the clear blue sky one morning. For no particular reason when I was opening my SuperDOM one morning to start trading I heard, clear as a bell, “Stop counting”. Simple as that. Automatically my subconscious took control of my SuperDOM and turned off my running P&L report at the bottom of the screen. And in my mind ticks and dollars look the same. So I blocked the tick count from view too. I felt like I was flying without a net…in the dark. But I was kind of excited to try it. 

The first week it was pretty much pointless. I was still keeping up with the money in my head and still anguishing over every loss. The second week was a little different. Keeping up with the money in my head was getting to be too much trouble…. so I started keeping up with ticks. For some reason the ticks did not feel as much like money anymore. Kind of like poker chips don’t feel like real money. But after another week or so, I quit counting ticks too. The markets have different tick sizes so keeping up with ticks was too much trouble to try to convert in my head and I decided it was pointless anyway. 

The 3rd week was when it started to turn around for me. That week I only counted winning trades and losing trades. Easy to do. If I could keep up with that, and just make sure I had at least double the winners to losers then I would be doing OK. So, I stuck with that for a few weeks and as if by magic, my account was growing. I had gained confidence by removing a mental block from my trading strategy……MONEY. All I had to do was win more than I lost. That’s it! 

The next step in this process was to stop worrying about today’s trading record. Previously, if I had more losers than winners on a particular day, then I worried about it until I could get back to trading the next day and try to make it up. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I was doing and remember what my friend said. He only checks his account about once a month or so. That was a little too long for me, but I decided to just look at my totals for the week every Friday afternoon. That’s when the game is over in my mind. Each trading day is just a period in the game.

It took some mental training on my part, which is what day trading is all about anyway. But once it became routine to me to trade that way and to include it as part of my trading plan, I’ve seen steady increases in my trading account. I am more relaxed during and after a trading day. And if I stick to my trading plan with dogged determination, then I have very few weeks where I have lost the game. Each week is just a game. The year is an entire season. I can afford to lose a few games on the way to the championships. 

Today my goal is to net 3 winners each day. I don’t care if I am trading single or multiple contracts, that’s my goal. When I hit that goal. I step into sim mode for the rest of the day and continue to trade. To me simming is like training for an athlete. It keeps you sharp and the more you do it more second nature trading will come to you when it is most important to make quick decisions. 

I was trading live (with real money) when I decided to try to rethink and retrain my mental attitude towards trading. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to sim my way into it, but I was not convinced that it would work and to be honest, this was a last-ditch effort for me. I was about to blow out my 3rd, and final account and had decided I only had a limited amount of time to turn it around or I’d have to go get a job. 

I was sure that my failures and subsequent turn around could benefit others in the lessons learned from the entire process. However, risking capital to do it was not only unnecessary, it was actually not the best way to learn to do it. There are many more lessons learned through the process than the obvious ones. And for those of you that choose to try the Trade℞2.0™ program, you will know what SOME of those lessons are as soon as you have completed the very first exercise. Trading is 80% mental/emotional and 20% mechanical/execution. You can find thousands of books, rooms, systems, strategies, coaches, and gurus that can teach you the mechanics of trading. So, this course will not do that. It will, however, force you to focus your efforts on following the trading rules that you have learned.

~Tony Peterson, The Intentional Trader




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    Risk Disclosure:
    Futures and forex trading contains substantial risk and is not for every investor. An investor could potentially lose all or more than the initial investment. Risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing ones’ financial security or life style. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

    Hypothetical Performance Disclosure:
    Hypothetical performance results have many inherent limitations, some of which are described below. no representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown; in fact, there are frequently sharp differences between hypothetical performance results and the actual results subsequently achieved by any particular trading program. One of the limitations of hypothetical performance results is that they are generally prepared with the benefit of hindsight. In addition, hypothetical trading does not involve financial risk, and no hypothetical trading record can completely account for the impact of financial risk of actual trading. for example, the ability to withstand losses or to adhere to a particular trading program in spite of trading losses are material points which can also adversely affect actual trading results. There are numerous other factors related to the markets in general or to the implementation of any specific trading program which cannot be fully accounted for in the preparation of hypothetical performance results and all which can adversely affect trading results

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