 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about sticking to your trading rules. 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 discussion of sticking with your trading rules. And by the way, I'm actually driving to my office this morning, so if you hear a little background noise, that's what that's all about. But I had a few minutes, so I wanted to share some thoughts that I've been having with you all. So sticking with your trading rules. So part of this comes about from, we just released our newest strategy class called the Navigation Trend Trading, the Ultimate Trend Trading Strategy. And it is, I mean, it's just, it's phenomenal. It really is. I've been trading it for almost a year now, testing it and really in its current form, just trading, I've traded thousands of trades, you know, just over the last six months. They're, obviously that means there's a ton of trading opportunities. So there is the ability to scale that way back. I am, I'm kind of a little bit over the top when it comes to the number of trades. So by no means does anyone else have to trade that much, but the opportunity is there if you are a trading junkie like myself. So with this strategy, obviously you can tell by the name, Trend Trading, that it is a directional type strategy. And the other thing about it is it's 100% rules-based. So there's no subjectivity of when to get in, when to get out. Maybe I should say it's 99% rules-based. The one thing that you can have a little bit of subjectivity to is the way that you scale out of your position. So there is a little bit of subjectivity there, but we lay out the rules for exactly how to start scaling out of your position. And the amount that you scale out is really the subjectivity. So for example, we have kind of a first target and at that point you need to be taking some chips off the table. You need to be booking some profits. And the subjective part is how much do you take off? Do you take off a quarter of your position? Do you take off half? Do you take off a third? Do you take off two thirds, three quarters, whatever it is, that doesn't really matter. That's the part that's subjective. That's the part that's up to you. The main thing is taking some chips off of the table, booking some profits at that point, paying yourself as the trade moves in your favor. So that's just a little piece of the rules. But what I really want to talk about is following the rules and I'm already starting to see it with some folks in our community. We just presented this class on Tuesday at the time of this recording is Friday. And in the community, I'm already seeing people, yeah, but what if you added a MACD to this? Or yeah, what if you added this to the, and people are already, people in our community are already trying to change the rules of the strategy. Now, I have zero issue. I have zero problem with somebody taking our strategy and making it their own. Maybe you have confidence. Maybe it allows you to take the trade with more confidence if you have some other type of scenario in with the strategy, whether that's one of your indicators that you think is this magic thing that creates this high probability situation or whatever it might be. I have zero problem with that. Here's what I have a problem with is we're literally three days in and folks have barely taken any trades with the system before trying to change it and add things and do all kinds of stuff. I don't release a strategy and we don't create the criteria for the strategy without it going through a massive amount of back testing, forward testing, real money trading and that kind of thing. So my point is take what we've given you because we've put a lot of time, a lot of effort into that and place a hundred trades with it. Maybe that's a hundred paper trades. In fact, I would suggest everyone place at least a hundred paper trades with strategy before you consider risking real money. And then when you start risking real money, do it very, very small because we know that paper trading fills and stuff, those are not accurate. The paper trading is designed for you to get to know the platform that you're trading on, for you to get to know the strategy and see how it moves while you're in the trade. You know, we had a conversation in the community in our day trading chat where someone said, you know, I've been doing my hundred paper trades like you suggest and my performance is really good, but it doesn't seem like I get the same pricing fills when I do it in real life as I did with my paper trading. And I was like, oh no, no, no, you know, hopefully it wasn't me who miscommunicated. The reason you do paper trading is not to track performance because paper trading, you're gonna get instantly filled at the best possible price when you place the trade. Well, we all know in real life trading that that's not the case. So the paper trading is not designed to track performance because that is never, ever, ever going to be accurate. And there's no way around it. Paper trading is simply to start to understand some of the nuances of the strategy, how it moves while you're in the trade, getting to know the platform and that's it. But that is valuable. And so you should still use paper trading while you're learning a new strategy, but not for tracking performance. So going back to our system and the rules around it and why we have the criteria and why we have the rules set that we do, and that's because we've gone through the ringer with this thing to make it, to really make it optimal to maximize profits and minimize risk. And so I would just ask that you follow the rules that we have set out and do a hundred paper trades, do a hundred small one lot trades or two lot trades on very low cost symbols, just so you can understand what we've done before you start to add your own rules or your own indicators or your own criteria to the program. Because what I think you will find is that you're gonna waste a lot of time trying to add a bunch of stuff and adding confusion and adding additional mess to your charts that is going to actually work against you as opposed to helping you get better returns. You know, I think what happens a lot of times is you do a few trades the way that we tell you to do it and you know, let's say you do 10 trades, you have seven winners and three losers. You focus naturally, you focus on those losing trades and you wonder, you think, how could I have avoided those trades? And you start going down a rabbit hole of adding indicators, oh, well, if I would have done this at this situation, it would have kept me out of that trade or if I would have done that, it would have kept me out of the trade. And we are always seeking ways to mitigate losses, right? Which is good in one aspect, but on the other aspect, you cannot mitigate losses. Okay, we can minimize losses and that's what we've already done with the rules of the system. We have minimized losses, but you can never mitigate losses. Taking losses is part of trading and the way that we've set the system up, the way that we've set the methodology up, we have minimized losses and set it up to maximize our profits as well. So I'm super excited for you all to get to know this strategy, the Navigation Trend Trading. We set up two separate channels in our Discord community, specifically for this. One is where I will, on a daily basis, I will be posting trades, posting new trade opportunities for that day. I've been doing a couple of videos too just to help people understand some of the little nuances that go along with it. And then the second channel is a chat channel dedicated to discussions around the Navigation Trend Trading system. So if you have questions, comments, wanna share your stories about your trades, you wanna post trade ideas where you see a particular stock setup that you wanna share with the community, you can do that as well. It really is a fantastic system, but just stick to the rules, trade it as we have provided the rules for you before you try to make any adjustments. But I'm really excited to get this into your hands and for you to start really digging in and using it because it literally has taken our trading to a different level since we've been trading it in its current form over the last six months. I've seen my accounts just compound and grow significantly more than they were with just the other strategies that I was trading. And this isn't something that is taking over all of my trading, I'm using 20 to 30% of my capital of my main trading account for these trades, still doing the same iron ducks and weekly double calendars and double diagonals and short strangles and iron condors and everything else. And so I think they all work together in just a very complimentary way. So by no means is this taking over every aspect of trading, but it has certainly become a big part of my trading and it has certainly had a huge impact on the profits of my trading. So that's all I got for you today, short episode, but just wanted to share those thoughts with you. If you wanna join our community, it's free to join, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We've got hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff that we talk about here, but sharing trade ideas. And we've got, like I said, sold dedicated channels to specific strategies. So if you're looking to learn, that is the best way to do it. Take care, have a good one, community.navigationtrading.com and we'll see you in the next episode.