 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about how to trade like Connor McGregor. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into this episode, how to trade like Connor McGregor. Now you might be thinking, wait, Connor McGregor, the UFC fighter trades options? I had no idea. I actually, I have no idea either, if he does, probably not. But what I want to talk about is I was watching a, I don't know if you want to call it a documentary, but it was a series about UFC fighting. And I'm not a huge, I don't watch every UFC fight or anything like that. I, you know, I, from time to time, if it's on, I'll, I'll check it out. And it, you know, it's kind of compelling. But the point is this, that one thing that I picked up, and yes, I relate everything that I see in life, somehow it relates back to trading. Yes, I have an issue. I know, but that's who I am. So deal with it. So Connor McGregor, so in this series on UFC that I was watching, it was about a specific fight between Connor McGregor and the guy's name is Jose. It's spelled like Jose, but they were pronouncing it Jose, Jose Aldo. And I think the fight was in like 2015 or something like that. But basically, so you've got Connor McGregor, who's arguably one of the greatest featherweight UFC fighters of all time. And one of the reasons that I've come to at least my opinion of why he's one of the greatest is not only because of his tactics inside of the octagon, but also because he has the ability to make his opponents emotional. Okay. So he knows that when his opponent becomes fearful or overly emotional, it usually is at the expense of our logic. Okay. We don't think clearly when we are afraid. So in the months leading up to this fight, Connor kept taunting Jose. He belittled him. He did things like in the press conference in Jose's hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When they were doing the press conference, he put his feet up on the broadcasting table just to kind of show some disrespect. And then, you know, Jose kind of took Connor's bait and he did the same thing. And then Connor jumped up and he grabbed Jose's championship belt off of the table and started getting in his face and screaming in his face. You know, so Jose's the champion. But yet Connor is using his kind of out of the octagon tactics to get under Jose's skin, to make him emotional, to try to create some type of fear in him before the fight. Okay. And I really think that at that point, even before the fight started, that the fight was over. Okay. So when they finally faced off, you could almost see like the fear in Jose's eyes right before the bell rung right before they went out to fight. And you could see, and I think what he said was right before the fight, you know, one last kind of like dig. Connor said, let's go, boy. You know, so it was kind of like, all right, you're mine. And so you could tell that Jose was emotional. And when the fight started, you know, they kind of took a couple seconds. But then Jose just just charged Connor trying to just kind of like a haymaker trying to try to take him out. Connor slipped and hit him right in the jaw. And he was completely out before he even hit the mat. Knocked him out within 13 seconds of the bell ringing. So if you want to see a clip of that, you can just, you can YouTube Connor McGregor, 13 second KO of Jose Aldo or something like that. But so what, what does that have to do with us? Right. What does that have to do with trading? Well, I know for me, there has been many, many times when I have made bad trading decisions because I was emotional. Right. I think, I think it's accentuated even more if you're doing shorter duration trades like day trading where you can get emotional. And if, if you start to get fearful because you've taken some losses or you start to get emotional because you've taken, you've taken a, you've taken a string of losses, you start revenge trading. You start trying to get back at the market. You start trying to throw that haymaker out of control. And what does the market do? The market slips your punch and knocks you out. In one punch, it can. Right. So this, this whole concept, it's just, it's, it's a reminder that we make bad decisions when we are fearful or emotional. If you've been trading or investing for any period of time, let's just think about long-term investing. I mean, if you have a job where you contribute to a 401k plan, think about what emotions you've, you've gone through with, with those investments. If you were invested in 2000 when the tech bubble burst, or if you were invested in 2008 when the financial crisis happened, or if you were invested in 2020 when the COVID crash happened, how did you feel when your account dropped by 15, 20, 30, 50%, right? When your 401k became a 201k, right? How did, how did you feel about that? Because I know, I heard from multiple people where after the drop happened in the market, they got scared, fear crept in, and they moved their money out of stocks into something more conservative. Let's call it cash. Okay. So what happened in that case? They got fearful as the market was coming down, they moved to cash. And so not only did their account get hit on the downside, but when, when are they supposed to get in? I mean, when it, when the market actually hit the bottom, everyone, the market was still full of fear. Everyone was still fearful. So I, there's very few that got back in at the very bottom. And so not only did they, did their account get hit on the downside where they lost money, but they missed the entire rebound as well. And when did they get back in? When everything felt warm and comfortable and fuzzy and the market had already ripped back up, you know, double digit plus returns, right? So fear is a huge driver. And when it comes to trading, because we are trading shorter duration and we are having these emotions happen even faster, it compounds that effect of fear on our trading. Another example, think about, think about if you watched the news, which I try not to, but even, even like if you're watching financial news on CNBC or something like that, what is the vast majority of that news based around? It's based around fear, right? It's based around negativity because that's what sells. If you think that the news stations, if you think the media out there is actually there to provide unbiased, just general information to provide you the details of what's actually going on, you could not be more wrong, okay? They are for profit, publicly traded, a lot of times publicly traded companies, or if they're a private company, they are still all about the bottom line. And what sells, fear, okay? The nice, cushy, comforting, good news about what's going on in the world, nobody cares. That's not going to draw eyeballs to their newspapers, magazines, TV stations. It's all about fear, fear sells. So that's what they continue to pump out into the system. And if you internalize that fear, if you internalize that so-called information that they're just putting out there, then it can cause you to make decisions that you wouldn't otherwise make if you were not doing things out of fear, okay? So if you're reading articles and making trading decisions based on those articles, or if you're watching CNBC and making trading decisions based on an opinion or what somebody's saying on CNBC, it's never going to work out for you, okay? That is not a trading plan. And trust me, I know it's difficult, right? It's coming at us from all different angles. If you're on social media, the vast majority of stuff being posted on social media is fear-based or negative. If you're watching the news or watching television or reading even YouTube or articles, I mean, the biggest, if you look at YouTube, I mean, some of the most watched videos on a daily basis are fear-based or negative or shocking, you know, all those little things that get you to click, that get you to view, and if you don't have a filter for that fear, if you don't have a filter for that negativity, you're going to eventually internalize it and it's going to cause you to make decisions based on that fear, not based on rational logic. One of the greatest trading psychology books of all time, in my opinion, is Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. And one of the lines that he says that I talk about all the time in that book is, he says, and I don't have it in front of me, but it's something to the effect of, if there's one thing that causes traders to be unsuccessful, I can't say it any more clearly than this, it's fear, okay? So this is a guy who worked with hedge funds, individual traders, institutions for decades, unfortunately, Mark Douglas is no longer with us, but he worked with so many different traders and primarily on the psychological aspect of trading, and he said fear is the number one reason that traders fail. So if we're being bombarded with fear and negativity in the world that we live in, we have to be able to filter that out so that we can make rational, logical, unemotional trading decisions, and so you have to create a filter, you have to block that stuff out and just focus on the strategy or methodology that you're trading. So if the market starts acting like Connor McGregor and poking and prodding and getting under our skin and we think the market's out to get us and we get emotional, step back, take a deep breath, and be Connor McGregor. Don't let the market be Connor McGregor to you. Hopefully that helps. Talk to you guys in the next episode.