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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