 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, we're going to talk about finding your trading niche. 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, welcome back. So let's jump into our discussion of finding your niche in trading. By the way, I don't know if you pronounce that word niche or niche. I actually looked it up because I've always said niche, but I've been hearing more and more people pronounce it niche. So not sure what you do, but I did look it up and here's what I found out. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it is officially pronounced niche in American and Canadian English and niche in British English. So basically, Americans say niche and if you're not from the US, you say niche. So there you go, there's your little history lesson. All right, so finding your trading niche. This topic actually came about today during our live stream. We stream live doing day trading each morning for the first 90 minutes at the market open and one of our members, shout out my man, Krish, said, well, so I mentioned, hey guys, I'm really excited we're coming out with a new course. It's gonna be presented live. By the way, it is October 12th at 4 p.m. central time. October 12th at 4 p.m. central time. Mark your calendars. We'll be sending out more information about it in our community and by email. So look for that to get registered. But I mentioned, hey, we've got this new course coming out, I'm super excited about it. I was talking about some of the trades that I've been making and kind of the performance and just a little bit about it. And Krish mentioned, so we now have 16 different strategy courses. And his comment was, adding another strategy, isn't that going to create confusion? I'm kind of paraphrasing. I can't remember exactly how he said it. And my comment was, if you come to navigation trading and you see, oh my gosh, they've got 16 different strategy courses, I'm new to trading options. Or even if I'm a veteran trader and I'm not familiar with all these different strategies, that can be very overwhelming. And so he brought this point up and I thought, that's a really good topic to have a podcast episode on because I think there are probably a lot of other folks that feel that way once they get into navigation trading and they say, oh my gosh, look at all of this information, look at all these different strategies. It might be overwhelming. I don't even know where to start. And so I wanna clarify the way that navigation trading is built and why we have so many different strategies. By no means are we looking for people to join navigation trading and just absorb every single strategy right away and it's gonna take you some time to learn all the different strategies. But here's why we do this. Is because each person, A has a different personality, has a different type of mentality when it comes to trading. Some people have an inclination to want to day trade. Some people have an inclination to wanna swing trade. Some people have an inclination to only wanna do long-term investing. Some people gravitate to selling premium. Some people gravitate to directional strategies. And so there's all these different types of strategies and we teach a lot of different strategies in all of those aspects because we want to provide an expertise and knowledge in these different areas because not everybody's the same. I think I wouldn't doubt if navigation trading would be a much bigger membership, have many more members if we just focused on one or two things and that's all we did. But our goal at navigation trading has never been to be the biggest membership. Our goal is to empower people and the more we can give them, the more value we can provide, the more content we can provide, the more strategies that we can provide, eventually somebody's gonna find a niche in our different segments that is gonna be the perfect fit for them. So let me give you an example. Tim Weiss, who is now part of the navigation trading team, he was, at one point, he was a member with us. And he basically took one of our strategies that we teach in one of our courses. So it was the weekly double calendar and he revised it and tweaked it and made it fit for him. And in fact, the name of his strategy that he calls it is the red strategy, R-E-D-D, which stands for revised enhanced double diagonal. And so Tim is a perfect example because at one point he mentioned to me that he was trying to do all the alerts that we were doing and all the different strategies and realized that just was not a good fit for him. It wasn't a good fit for his, the way he wanted to do it. It wasn't a good fit for his lifestyle. And so he really just focused in on one specific strategy and just became an absolute master at that strategy. I also know that he trades that one strategy exclusively and he only trades a handful of symbols. He trades the major indices and some of the major ETFs and he does some stocks, but that's really about it. He has a very small universe of symbols that he trades. Number two, his lifestyle, as I mentioned before, is one that he wants to only have to focus on trading for a very finite period of time each day. Maybe it's an hour, maybe it's two hours, something like that. So he doesn't wanna be glued to his computer screen. I know other traders who focus and only trade one symbol. I know one trader who only trades SPX, that's it. I know another trader who only does over-the-counter penny stocks and does very well at it and that's all they do. I know another trader who only trades vertical spreads. They only trade directional vertical spreads in different direction and they focus on just the highest volume, most actively traded stocks and that's all they do. Another one of our members, Mike, all he does is trade Iron Ducks, one of our strategies. So he's become very focused, he's become a master at that and it has become kind of part of his whole mentality, part of his whole trading and it's just because of the way that strategy behaves and how he has learned about it and become an expert at it and profited from it that that has become just kind of a sole focus. And then there's people like me. I like to trade all different kinds of strategies and you might be thinking, well, if you're trading so many different strategies, doesn't that, you know, don't you lose focus on certain things? And I would say, yeah, I mean, probably there are times where I lose focus and don't trade certain strategies because I'm focusing on something over here but here's the thing, trading a lot of different strategies fits my personality. I love trading specific strategies in specific environments. I love trading all different strategies depending on what the situation is. And the reality is, this is all I do, right? So, you know, if you have a full-time job, if you're not a full-time trader, if you have a full-time career, if you have other, you know, massive time commitments where you can't be solely focused on trading, then yeah, you probably shouldn't be trading every single strategy that we teach. You should probably narrow it down to one strategy or two strategies or even three or four. It doesn't matter. It just depends on your situation. Everybody's different. It depends on your situation and it depends on your time commitment and your capacity and your personality. I think the problem and kind of what Chris was getting at when he made the comment this morning in the community was, you know, is adding another strategy, is having all these strategies, is it too confusing? And I think it is for a couple of reasons. One, I mentioned before, I think, you know, someone might come in and say, oh my gosh, this is so overwhelming. I have to learn all of these strategies and instead of just taking it one step at a time and learning one strategy at a time, they get overwhelmed and they just don't do anything, right? They just decide trading's not for them or they just quit or do whatever. But the reality is what we want people to do is we want people to come in and find one strategy. We want to find, we want them to find one strategy and learn it and master it until it becomes their core strategy. Then, and only then, should you move on to another strategy? Because if you don't do it that way, yeah, you probably are gonna get overwhelmed or, you know, the other problem is if you just kind of half learn a strategy, you know, a lot of us suffer from the shiny object syndrome, right? Oh, we're doing this one over here and we kind of half know how to do it. But then we jump over here because this one looks cool or, oh, they, you know, navigation trading just put out this alert and they just booked a really nice profit. I'm gonna start learning that one and they jump around and jump around and never actually learn anyone's strategy to a level of mastery. Don't forget, I've been trading over 20 years. So, you know, this isn't something where I, you know, learned all of these strategies in one time. In fact, there are a couple of strategies that we trade a lot now that I didn't even trade 10 or 15 years ago. And so what you'll find will happen is that if, you know, if you start out and let's say, you know, kind of a common way for people to get into and start learning options would be like a covered call where maybe you already own some stock and you realize that selling calls against your long stock portfolio, against your long stock positions can enhance your returns over time almost like getting paid a dividend. You know, if you're doing 30 day calls you're getting paid a dividend every month on those stocks that you already owned anyway. And so you start doing that and that, and you get really comfortable and you kind of master that strategy. It's a very simple strategy. And then you start learning, okay, now what are these puts? And you start learning about selling puts. So instead of owning the stock and selling calls what if I, what if I sell a put? And if it comes down to a certain level and I get a sign the stock, oh, cool. Now I'm a sign the stock, but it's a much lower level. If I don't get assigned, I get to keep that premium of that put that I sold. And so those are, those are kind of two of the concepts that a lot of new traders come in with because they come in starting owning stock and understanding buying and selling stock. And that's kind of the next logical gradual progression in the way of option strategies. And then it might go to vertical spreads. You might say, okay, well, so now I can do kind of a stock replacement. I can buy a put vertical or sell a call vertical and get directional on an assumption that I have in that underlying stock and it's defined risk. So I know exactly what my risk is. I know exactly what my profit is. And so that might be the next gradual step. And then you get into iron condors. Wow, okay. Now I don't even have to be right on the direction of the stock as long as that stock stays in my range I can profit that way. And now you start to understand the leverage component of options. And you can look at potentially getting directional using leverage of options and being able to leverage a directional move if you're correct on your assumption. And then maybe you discover futures and you realize, oh, if I don't even need to trade stocks I can just trade an index or I can trade gold and I can get directional. And I know exactly how much I'm going to make or lose based on the points that the underlying asset moves. And then you realize, oh my gosh I can trade options on futures. So if there's a situation in gold and I want to sell premium in gold when implied volatility is high I can create a range bound positioning gold and on and on and on and then you get to the different variations of an iron condor and able to skew it and create an iron duck and realize, oh my gosh I have no risk to the upside and I have this huge buffer to the downside and it keeps going and going and going until you start to learn all these different things but it starts with, you're never going to get to that point where you're doing some of these more advanced or more exotic types spreads unless you start with the basics unless you start with what makes sense to you and you master that specific strategy or methodology. And that's why I tell people too when they and I think I talked about this in a previous episode where people will come in and they will try to mimic our alerts. They'll try to get the exact same fills they'll try to do the same number of contracts because they see our performance and they're just trying to mimic those details without even really understanding the strategy they're getting the alert and they're putting it into their broker and they're hoping for the best and the reality is the reason we send out the alerts is to help you understand why we trade how we trade the strategies and when we trade in what market environment. So we provide the detailed step-by-step courses but the alerts are designed to help you understand how and why and some of the details which strikes did we choose and how do we manage them if they go against us and all of the different criteria that we lay out in the strategy courses. But the alerts are not designed for you to come in and take every single trade that we do and get every single fill price that we do and to use the same number of contracts that we do. That's completely missing the point. The alerts are designed to give you a taste of all the different strategies that we trade. You figure out which ones are a good fit for you and master those specific strategies. So I thought it was a really good topic that Krish brought up this morning in our live stream and I just wanted to elaborate on that. So if you guys, by the way, if you guys have any other topics or any other trading related or financial related topics that you want me to cover in a future podcast episode, just drop me a line either at infoatnavigationtrading.com or feel free to post in our Discord community which is at community.navigationtrading.com. We have hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. We have people talking about the mindset stuff. We have people sharing trade ideas, so it's free to join. Just go to community.navigationtrading.com. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.