 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about trading in your comfort zone. 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 trading in your comfort zone. I want to emphasize how important this is. This is probably one of the most important things that you can understand to take your trading to the next level, okay? So what is this trading comfort zone? Well, let's back up and talk about just being in your comfort zone in different areas of life. You know, in a lot of areas of life, we are taught that if we want to grow, if we want to level up, if we want to take our success to another level, we have to get out of our comfort zone. Think about this. If you own a business, it's all about selling more, innovating more, meeting new people, getting out of your comfort zone to accelerate your business. If you've ever played any type of competitive sports, you know that it's the more you push, the more you work out, the harder you play, that takes you to that next level in sports. Same thing with relationships. Go deeper, always try new things, keep it fresh. It's always pushing and moving to that new level, getting out of our comfort zones. And those are the things that take us to that next level. However, in trading, all of these things work against you. You do not want to get out of your comfort zone when you're trading. You want to get in your comfort zone. You want to find your comfort zone and you want to stay in that comfort zone. And we're not even talking about the trading strategy that you become comfortable with. I'm talking about, you could have the greatest strategy in the world, but if you are trading that strategy outside of your comfort zone, you will fail. So let's talk about this. What is your zone? Because it's different for everybody. And it's extremely simple, but yet for some reason, traders complicate this and make it difficult on themselves to succeed because they don't stay within their comfort zone. So what is your comfort zone or how do you find your comfort zone? Number one, you figure out the amount that you can risk on a trade and still be comfortable, okay? If you're a new trader, maybe that's $250. Maybe it's $500. If you're experienced, maybe it's $5,000. Maybe it's $10,000. Maybe it's $50,000. It's different for everybody, but you have to find that level of risk. You have to find that risk level that is your emotional threshold for risk and you have to figure that out what that is for you. Now, here's the next thing and this is key. Once you find that emotional threshold of risk, once you find that level of risk that you think you're comfortable with, cut it in half. So if you tell me, okay, my risk level is $500. I'm comfortable risking $500 on this trade. Cut it in half, make it $250. Because here's what I know after working with thousands and thousands of traders. What you say your risk level is, what you say your comfortable risk level is, is more than it actually is. And here's how I know this to be true. We will send out a trade and if the trade goes against you, I immediately get bombarded with emails, post in the community, direct messages about what do we do with this trade that's gone against us? Sometimes it's in a little bit of a state of panic which tells me if you are concerned about the outcome of any single trade, then you have exceeded your emotional threshold for risk. You see, you said you were comfortable with that amount of risk, but you were comfortable with that risk if the trade went in your favor. But the fact that now the trade is going against you, now all of a sudden that level of comfort with the amount of risk you took, you're not comfortable anymore. Now, sometimes there's also the issue that you potentially may have entered a trade without actually knowing the rules of how to manage it if it goes against you, which we lay out step by step in every single strategy course that we teach, but that's a whole nother set of issues. But assuming you actually understand the strategy, you actually understand the trade that you entered, 99.9% of the time when I get these messages, it's because the trader has exceeded their personal risk level. So the first thing that you need to do is you need to determine your comfort, risk, emotional, threshold, amount, whatever that is per trade and cut it in half, okay? Number two, now that you've figured out this position size for each individual trade, the next question is, how many of these trades can I have on at one time? So how do you figure this out? Well, what you do is you put one on. See how that feels. If you feel good, if you feel like you're in your comfort zone, then add another one. Now you have two positions. How does that feel? Do you feel comfortable? Are you checking your trading platform every five minutes? Are you, when you go to bed at night, are you waking up in the middle of the night and checking your phone to figure out what's going on? If that is the case, then you have exceeded your threshold per position or the number of positions you have on a time. If you're comfortable with two, try three. If you're comfortable with three, try four. If you're comfortable with four, try five. Keep going and going and going. What will happen is that eventually you will reach the level of where you determine having too many positions on exceeds your emotional threshold, okay? Every trader is different and every trader will figure this out once they hit a certain number of trades and a certain level of risk per trade. You will figure out your max once you start to feel uncomfortable, which like I said, it's constantly looking at your trading platform. Starting to take trades off too early is another sign that you are uncomfortable. You have to be completely honest with yourself about what your comfort level is. And as you continue to trade a specific strategy or a specific group of strategies, you're gonna start becoming more and more comfortable and your emotional threshold for risk, whether that's the size of each trade or the number of positions that you have on, that may start to grow. So if you're a newer trader, it's gonna be one level. It's gonna be a lower level. And typically as you get more comfortable and as you continue to book profits and you continue to make good decisions, you will be able to continue to expand the size of each position. You'll be able to expand the number of positions that you have on at one time. So for example, here is my personal comfort zone. So I trade a lot of different strategies. So let's start with just day trading, for example. When I'm day trading, whether that's trading futures or trading options on stocks or whatever it is, the most positions that I want to have on to be able to stay in my trading comfort zone is four. If I start to have five or six or seven, what I have found is that I start to make bad decisions. When I have four or less, I make good decisions. So that's how I've come to the realization that as long as I have four or less positions on when I'm day trading, I am in my trading comfort zone. When it comes to our navigation trend trading strategy, I will have up to 40 positions on at a time. Now, these are swing trades. These are not intraday trades. These are trades that I check a couple of times a day. I typically enter around midday. I typically go through and check them again towards the end of the day. And I'm very comfortable having 40 positions on at one time. Now, when we first started the strategy, did I just throw on 40 positions? No, of course not. I started with one, then I added another, then I added another and I built up to where now I was comfortable with 10 positions on. And then I was comfortable with 15 and then 20 and then 30. And now I'm very comfortable having 40 positions on. Number one, the more you have on, the more time it takes you to monitor those. So that's part of it. But I'm very comfortable having 40 positions on. If I start to exceed that, it just starts, the monitoring and my decision making starts to fall off. And so I've come to the realization that 40 of the NTT trades on at one time is within my comfort zone. And then I'll group all of our other strategies that I trade, whether it's short strangles, iron ducks, iron condors, calendars, double calendars, all of our different income type strategies. My comfort zone is having less than 30 of those positions on at any given time. Okay, so day trading, I can have up to four on at a time. I get out of those. I can go check my NTT trades. I have about, I can have less than 40 of those on. Go through those, monitor, manage those and less than 30 income trades on. And that is within my comfort zone. If I get out of that comfort zone, if I start trading more than that, then that's when I start to make bad decisions. And I'm not gonna run through my position size for each individual position because it's different based on the strategy. But I have found my zone of comfort when it comes to the individual position sizes that fall into each of those categories as well. And that's exactly what you need to do. Okay, so once you get to the point where you have found your risk threshold for the individual positions that you trade, and then you have found your emotional threshold for the number of positions you have at one time, you have found your comfort zone. Now, what you have to do is you have to stay in that comfort zone. There is no situation, there is no circumstance where it ever makes sense for you to leave your comfort zone. I don't care how good the setup looks. I don't care how good the trade looks. I don't care how good the market environment appears. Never go outside your comfort zone. And what I know from working with thousands of traders over the years, successful traders stay in their comfort zone, unsuccessful traders trade outside of their comfort zone. They make bad decisions and they worry about individual trades. If you don't follow this, I wanna be very clear. If you don't follow this, it doesn't matter what strategy you're trading, you will fail. You will make bad decision. If you stay in your trading comfort zone, you will be successful over time. I don't care what strategy you are trading because you will make good decisions. Our decisions accumulate over time. Our decisions, they accumulate over many occurrences. And if you have a consistent amount of bad decisions, you are going to have bad results. If your accumulation of decisions are good over time, over many trade occurrences, you are going to have positive results. So you have to keep yourself in this comfort zone that works for you. Even at my level, even after trading for over 20 years, sometimes I will find myself outside of my comfort zone. Now for me now, it typically doesn't equate to the level of having too many positions on. It would typically come from a situation where I might have a position that exceeds my emotional threshold on an individual trade basis. Okay, so even at my level, sometimes I find myself out of my comfort zone. So what do I do? Well, we've talked about it in the past episode. If you're keeping a trading journal, if you're keeping a mindset journal, if you're on a daily basis, if you're kind of checking in with yourself, sometimes you have to do that and be honest with yourself and get yourself back into that comfort zone. When you're in your comfort zone, you are going to see the market clearly. You are going to see opportunities just come to you instead of trying to force your will, trying to force your strategy, trying to force your income goals onto the market. And you will simply just make better decisions. One thing I've learned over the years is in many, many cases, the less I risk, the more money I make. The less money I risk, the more money I make. Isn't that crazy? I mean, if you're a new trader, you're gonna think, well, that doesn't make any sense mathematically, that doesn't make sense. If I'm making money on a strategy, I just need to continue to escalate my allocation to that strategy as my profits grow, increase my size, and my profits will automatically compound. But you're not taking into consideration the mental side of trading, which is the biggest piece of your trading puzzle. I hope this was helpful. If you want assistance from a community to help keep you in your trading zone, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We call it the trade hacker community. It's free to join. We look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.