 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I wanna discuss the phrase, I should have. 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 topic of the phrase, I should have. So when we are going through our normal course of life, I think we use that phrase a lot, right? You get home and you say, ah, I should have stopped at the store to get some milk. Or I should have filled up my gas tank because I needed to be ready to leave early tomorrow and I didn't have time to stop. And that's a pretty normal situation in everyday life, right, and it's harmless. There's nothing wrong with saying, I should have done this, I should have done that. You know, we all have those thoughts. We all say that at one point or another on a day-to-day basis. But when it comes to our trading, that phrase can actually be very detrimental to our decision-making process and our emotional wellbeing when it comes to our trading. And I see this comment or variations of this comment in our community a lot, and it usually happens in situations like, for example, when we're trading zero DTE and the stop gets hit, you know, there's always a lot of comments about, oh, I should have removed my stop. I should have moved it. I should have placed it differently. I should, should, should have. But the reality is, no. No, you should not have. If you stuck to your plan, that means much more than making a change in the middle of a trade. Because here's the big problem. If you do that, if you make that change, if you go against your plan, you have now just opened up the door to break your rules again. So if it worked for you this time, it opens up the door for you to break the rules again next time. As traders, from a human nature standpoint, we have a tendency to get really laser focused on just one specific trade. The trade that we are in right now, as opposed to thinking of it, as just another trade in the sequence of hundreds or thousands of trades that we are going to take over time. And if you are going to be a probability trader, like I am, then you have to be focused on the law of large numbers, not just individual trades. If you're going to trade a strategy based on a back test, or based on statistics and probabilities around that strategy, then you can't say, I should have. Now, if your plan is to be a discretionary trader, and your plan is that you are going to make decisions not based on statistics, not based on probabilities, not based on a back test, then hey, you can say I should have all you want. The problem is you will never know if you got lucky or if what you did in that decision-making process, in that discretionary decision-making process is real until you've actually made hundreds of trades over and over and over again. And the problem with that is that you'll never be able to scale. You'll never have the confidence to be able to scale up the number of contracts, to scale up your position size, to get to the level of trading that I think we all want to get to. Now, there's nothing wrong with discretionary trading. There are very good discretionary traders, but if you are trading a strategy based on a back test, based on a large number of occurrences, and you're constantly changing in mid-trade your strategy or you're constantly, if you go into a string of losers and you start infiltrating your mind with the I should have's, the problem is that before long, if you keep saying I should have done this, I should have moved my stop, I should have widened my stop, I should have taken profits, I should have cut my losses. If you start saying these different things, I should have, I should have, I should have, the problem is, with saying that to yourself, is you're going to start believing it and eventually you are going to break your rules. Because here's the reality. Going back to that example of if you're trading zero DTE and your stop gets hit, okay, that's it. That's what you were entitled to. You are not entitled to the profits if your stop gets hit and price comes back into range. You're just not entitled to it. That's not part of the plan. We're always looking for trade, it's human nature. We're always looking for ways to eliminate the losing trades of a series and only be in the trades that are profitable, but that's not how trading works. So the quicker you can get that out of your mind, the quicker you're going to elevate your trading and become more and more consistent. If you're listening to this podcast, you understand that trading is such a mental game and trading well works against our native mental framework as humans. So it's critical that we constantly reinforce the right thoughts and the right behaviors and constantly saying, I should have done this. I should have done this differently. Based on one specific trade is detrimental to the mental and emotional aspect and the mental framework that we need to build and reinforce as traders. Because think about this. I mean, on one individual trade, saying I should have done this, I should have done that. Well, you know what? I should have held Apple when I bought it at $10 a share. I started buying Bitcoin when it was $100 a coin. I should have held all that investment that I put in Bitcoin back when it was $100. I should have bought more. Saying that is no different than the individual short-term trades that you're saying I should have done something on. The reality is we can only see up to the right side of the chart at the time that we're viewing it. We have no idea what's going to happen into the future. The market can do anything at any time and we have to respect that and understand that we can only do the best that we can do based on the information that we have specifically right now at this time. And if this trade works against us, that is what it is. There is no I should have. So while saying I should have in the normal course of life, maybe harmless, when it comes to trading, it can create bad habits and it can create an unfavorable mental framework that we need to have to be successful. Something that I've done to help this situation and I've done it plenty in the past but it's really kind of come through and shown its value here recently. So one of the strategies that we trade for zero DTE is something we call Power Hour where we're trading the last hour of the day. And what I've begun to do is have a plan, have a trading strategy backed up by back tested results that's been robust ever since daily options, daily expiration options were available. And with that plan, I simply execute the plan every single day, day in and day out. And by doing that and committing to that plan regardless of what happens for one month at a time and then at the end of the month if there's something I want to change about the plan or change about the strategy or if I wanna stop doing the strategy I'll do that at the end of the month but just that little commitment, just that little tweak in how I perceive and view and decide I'm going to execute a plan, just that little tweak, it eliminates all that I should have because I know that this is just what I'm doing. Sometimes it's going to be a loser, a loser, sometimes it's going to be a winner. In fact, only between 55 and 60% of the time is that strategy going to win, which means what, 45, 40% of the time that strategy is gonna be a loser. So four out of 10 times I know that I'm going to lose on that strategy but it doesn't matter because I don't really care what happens on a single individual trade. What I care is that it consistently builds profits over a large number of occurrences. Now, if you build a plan like that and you make a commitment like that you also have to make sure it is a plan you can execute and I'll tell you this from just very recent experience I tried to do something similar with a strategy that I was trading in the morning session and this is also on zero DTE strategies. And what I found is that for the month of May, for example, at the time of this recording it's the first part of June. So this is fresh in my mind. I went back and updated my strategies for the month of June, just this week. And one thing that happened in May is my morning session I did not execute as intended. I did not follow my own plan and I realized that part of it was the position size I was using. Part of it was, it just wasn't the most friendly environment for that particular strategy for the month which is, that happens. But you also, you need to make sure that your plan of action is something that you can execute day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out. You need to make sure that it's something you can execute without a lot of friction from a mental capacity. So I realized that, and not to get too in the weeds on this specific example, but basically this was kind of a re-entry strategy. So my strategy was to enter near the open of the market each day. If I got stopped out, I would re-enter and so forth and so on. The problem is in this situation was I was trading with a little bit bigger size. Now the risk involved was well within my risk tolerance. It was well within my, you know, based on my account size and risk tolerance and everything else. But what I found would happen is if I got stopped out and I re-entered with the same position size that I, you know, and I got stopped out again and then again, you know, two or three, it became an amount that made me uncomfortable to the point where I started making decisions that were not part of my plan. I started having these I should have's. You know, I should have reduced my position size. I should have used my old strategy that I used a couple months ago. I should have done this. I should have done that. It should have, could have, would have, right? And so you have to make sure that it is a plan that you can execute where it gives a very minimal chance of allowing those negative thoughts, of allowing those I should have's to come in. And that's part of the, that's part of the basis of getting those out of your vocabulary as well, is making sure that you're setting yourself up for success by actually trading something that's going to be very hard and difficult to allow those phrases to come into your mind to come into your vocabulary of self-talk and saying those things to yourself or to the community or whatever else. So I tell you that example. I tell you that story to also help you understand that in no way, shape or form am I perfect when it comes to removing I should have from my vocabulary or from my thought process. It happens to me and I've been trading for over 23 years. So the idea of talking about this topic, not only do I see it in the community and I see other people doing it. And so when I see other people do it, it's easy for me to say, ah, they need to stop saying that. But then when I reflect back on myself and realize, you know what, I still do the same thing. I still say that. And so this is a public service announcement that as a community, let's stop with the I should have. Let's focus on executing the plan better. Let's not focus on what could have been or what we think should have been. Let's focus on what we did and if we executed the plan, then that's all that matters. I have written on my whiteboard that I'm looking at right now, process over profits. Process over profits. When you focus on that, there is no room for the I should have. Hopefully this was helpful. If you have any questions, always feel free to drop those in the Trade Hacker Mindset channel in our Discord. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode or we'll see you in the community.