 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Trade Hacker Mindset podcast. This is our very first episode, so I want to share exactly what you can expect when you tune in to listen each week. 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. Okay, so let me break down exactly what this podcast is all about. To start, many of the episodes will be focused on a very specific topic designed to help you become a better trader. We won't spend a lot of time on specific trades or technical details such as how to place a trade in your brokerage account. We already provide step-by-step details on this in our video courses at navigationtrading.com. This podcast is also not about chasing the latest trend or talking about what Elon Musk tweeted recently or what the next big pharma release is going to be or which charts are the best for technical analysis. It's not about any of that. The focus of topics on this podcast, as you can probably gather by the title, will be focused on arguably the most important aspect of becoming a successful trader, the mental aspect, the mindset of trading. It's about learning to control and understand fear and greed and how to methodically rewire our minds to trade in an environment that creates peak performance. We're going to talk about trading in a way that you've likely never heard before. This podcast is about you and the psychological and emotional head games that can keep you from becoming a successful trader. As traders, when we first get started on our trading journey, we all start out on slightly different paths. For example, maybe when you started trading, it was because a friend was bragging to you about how much money they made when they bought a stock or you saw something online that made you think that you could make some easy money by placing a trade or you bought a course on how to trade a specific strategy or maybe you signed up for a newsletter from an air quote guru who would supposedly send you the best picks to profit from. You were sold the idea that if you just got the right picks from somebody on the inside, from someone in the know, that your laptop could now turn into a virtual ATM machine and start spitting out cash. Maybe eventually you found a magic indicator that would tell you exactly when to buy and when to sell. These are all pretty common ways that a lot of novice traders get started on their journey. For me, I remember is back in 1999, the market was going crazy. We are in the midst of a technology explosion. If a company added .com to the end of their name, the stock price would literally explode. And it seemed like on a daily basis, a company's stock price was increasing by 10 or 20 or 50% in the matter of days. And most of these companies weren't even close to profitable. Now, at the time of this recording, which is March of 2021, we're experiencing a very similar yet very different situation. You know, recently massive groups of retail traders on the online forum Reddit pushed stocks of GameStop and AMC theaters to astronomical levels before they came crashing back down to reality. Tesla is up nearly 1000% from where it was just a year ago. Cryptocurrencies are exploding. Bitcoin has gone from 5000 to over 55,000. And to make things even crazier, this is all going on during the worst pandemic that anyone currently alive has ever witnessed. At the time of this recording, there have been more deaths related to COVID than World War One, World War Two, and the Vietnam War combined. Yet the value of these different assets continue to explode higher. And as you can imagine, all of this has created publicity that has sparked really a new interest in trading and investing from a new generation of traders. The trading technology that's now available to individual traders is far better than most institutional traders have access to. Trading commissions and fees have been suppressed to a point of nominal friction, and individuals have equal access to instantaneous information. The playing field has been leveled. The large institutional traders and big banks that used to have the edge, they really don't anymore. In fact, the individual traders, because of how nimble they can be, actually have the edge over the large banks and institutions. So now, more than ever, the individual trader has the opportunity and has the ability to become a successful trader. So my question is this, if we all have access to the same technology, if we all have access to the same low or zero commissions, if we all have access to the same data, to the same information, then why are some traders successful, but most traders fail to ever become consistently profitable? This, my friends, is the whole basis for this podcast. And the answer is this, successful traders have created a mental framework that allows them to freely trade with confidence. It allows them to trade without fear. It actually does allow them to book profits with seemingly the ease of just a few mouse clicks. But make no mistake about it. It wasn't always easy for them. They had to dig deep into their souls. They had to go through financial and emotional pain like you can't imagine. And they were able to rewire their minds. I assure you, it has nothing to do with the secret magic indicator that they have on their charts. It has nothing to do with being more intelligent than you. It has 100% to do with the mental framework that they have created over time. Now, here's why creating the correct mental framework for successful trading is so difficult. It's because the same human characteristics that make us successful in other things in life do not work in trading the markets. In fact, they actually have the opposite effect. This is why so many people who have had extreme success in other professions are so terrible at trading the markets. Many of the worst traders I've ever met were successful doctors, successful lawyers, successful entrepreneurs or business owners. And think about this, some of the worst traders are actually financial analysts. And if you think about it from this perspective, it starts to make sense. One of the characteristics that makes individuals successful in these other professions is their ability to control the environment. They have control over their employees. They might have control over their customers or patients. But guess what? They cannot control the market. You see, you can only participate in what the market provides. And the reality is if you try to control the markets, the market will control you. You see, most novice traders, they start out and they focus on technical analysis or fundamental analysis or finding the perfect indicator or they focus on finding the perfect strategy or focus on spending a massive amount of time on market analysis. And while having a decent base of market and technical knowledge is necessary, most traders completely disregard that your success as a trader will have more to do with your mental framework than any of these other factors combined. This podcast is designed to get your mind right. We are here to help you develop the trade hacker mindset. We look forward to taking this journey with you and can't wait to hear how this content will help improve your overall trading success. In addition to these podcast episodes, we also have a community called the trade hacker community. And we have every day on a daily basis, we have hundreds of traders interacting like minded folks just like you who are trying to become successful traders. And in addition to the focus on mindset, these traders are also sharing trade ideas, answering questions. Members of the navigation trading team are in there on a daily basis, including myself, with one goal in mind of all helping each other become successful traders. If you're interested in checking that out, it's free to join. Just go to community.navigation trading.com. We hope to see you on the inside and we will see you at the next episode.