 Welcome. This is Melissa Armel with Stock Swoosh, and I thought I would do a little lecture tonight. It's something very interesting. It's called focusing on your winners instead of your losers. So what's a common mistake that traders make? And I just realized this actually after I was talking to some of the other day. I've known it before in the past, and I've seen that this is a trend when I talk to people that are new clients, when I talk to people that are thinking about doing the class, when I talk to people that are trying to become more successful than they are right now, even though they're profitable, they want to make more money. I'm talking about students that I have. I've noticed a common thread going through the way that people are looking at traits, which is very narrow-minded. In other words, and this is typical, this isn't, this is just in general, I've noticed that people tend to think like this in one direction, and they're very, very focused if they happen to have a losing trade if they are in several different positions that's on their P&L. Like say somebody's in five different positions. It could be day trades, it could be options, any more than one. If you've got a negative position and a bunch of other positions, even if they're positive, or if you have a couple negative positions and a couple positive positions, either way, it's the idea of having several different positions on at the same time, some positive, some negative. So this isn't about like if you just have like one loser, okay? This is if you're looking at your P&L and it's during the day or in the morning or at night and you happen to see how things closed and you're looking at them and you're seeing some are down and some are up. What I've found is a tendency that and a common mistake the traders make is that they will focus on the losers. They will focus on the trade itself that is down, which they can't do anything about. If a trade's down, there's nothing you could do about it, just like there's nothing you could do about the fact that trades up except for you could get out of it. So you could get out of a trade that's up positive. A negative trade, you could get out of two, even if it's not down the full limit, you could get out of it with a partial loss. If it's all the way down, it's all the way down, but you can't force a stock to move. So when you focus on the trades that are down, when you focus on the losers, when you focus on the losses and the trades that are down could end up being positive trades. If it's an option, for example, and it's still on, it has a period of time that it's still, the trade is still technically in play, okay? Again, people should have money management rules that they follow consistently, whether it's hold or get out of a certain percentage, it's up or down or whatever. But in general, I'm noticing a trend when I'm talking to people more and more and more and more and talking to more people, as the business is growing, that people tend to focus on the losers. So that's mistake number one. Why? Because when you're focused on something, you're thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it, you're actually making the problem bigger, you're actually manifesting and pulling and thinking that this is like something that is a huge massive problem that you're creating bigger and bigger and bigger and you're creating, you're manifesting the losses. In other words, say you have one trade that's down and you're focused on that, so focused on that, if you take another trade that's down, you're gonna be focused on that. So then Monday Tuesday, you're focused on losses all the time. Well, how are you ever gonna be winning? You have to focus on winners. Winners that are up, trades that are working, analyze those. People are all the time, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? What do you think of this? You know, when something is in play, first of all, like I said, you have the money manager, you let it write out or not, but either way, you can't focus more on losing trades than winning trades. So the natural tendency I've found with people, and this is where the point I'm trying to get at, is that traders, when they're down in trades, if they have positive trades on and negative trades on, will focus on the losers, they will exit the winners, book the profits in the winners, sometimes too fast to assume, not even look at the chart, analyze it, not even trying to figure out if this is more room to go or if this is really good or anything. They'll just like book the profits from the positive trades and they will then focus 100% on the losses. What should they do about this one? What should they do? They're focusing then on the losses. So they're always, their number one priority is what? The losers. If your number one priority in trading is losers, then it's going to be obvious what result you're going to manifest for yourself. You will be always focused on losers and you will never make money in the market and you will never win. Don't be focused 100% on the losers. Focus on the winners. Sometimes the winners can be bigger trades. They can go on to win more and sometimes those winning trades can actually cover the losses of the ones that aren't going to work, which you can't control because you can't make a trade work or not work. So what's the point of being focused on the losers? The losers are down. Focus on the winners. Either booking half the profits, holding the profits more, whatever the case might be. So many people look at a chart, get out of the winners, focus on the chart on the losers. Losers, losers, losers. Should I get in as a turning round? What should I do? Focus on the winners, okay? Look at a chart when you're in a winner and say, does this have more potential? Can this go more? Can I make more money on this? Should I add to this trade? Should I take more size in it? If I do, will it cost average the position? Should I get about a half? And if the next day goes down, should I take more? These are the things that people should be focusing on, looking at the chart, looking at the information, focusing on the winners, how to get the most bang for the buck out of the winners. Because the losers are losers and you're not going to be able to change the fact that if they're going to lose, they're going to lose anyways. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, you set your risk, your risk should be consistent with every trade you take and that's it. And boom, okay? You are not going to make those losers turn into winners if they're going to, they're going to. If they're not, they're not. But by focusing all the time on the losers, exiting the profitable trades too soon, not even caring about the trades that are up, caring more about the losers and focusing on the losers is what is a bad habit. And it's one thing and one of the reasons why, again, traders are focused too much on losing. Too much on losing, negative attitudes, they're losing, they're focused on losing, they think they're going to lose, they have no confidence in themselves, they don't think any strategy works, they don't know what they're doing, they don't think that anything works but they keep trading, they keep losing, they keep focusing on the losers and in between when they take positive trades, they get out of them quick and then they focus on the losers again. And they are putting the energy out into the universe and the focus on the losers. So then it's no surprise that those people will continue to lose forever and ever and ever, okay? So I'm going to talk about Alta here because this was a trade that was a nice, nice call. And I'm just going to show you this whole chart here, this is a beautiful trade. Now I called a bunch of things out for a period of time out until the end of the month, people could still be in this, people could still be in this trade right here if they want to or any of the trades I called, I called a bunch of them, I forget how many I called now, it was like, I don't know, five, six, a lot of them. And they all worked. Now, what if you took the trade on the day that I called them or one of the trades, any of the trades, all the trades and you got out here, it was a fine exit, it was a great exit. That would have been a solid, solid exit, big bar, call puts in this, short of the day trade room, solid exit, and you're going into a weekend, take the profits, fine. Now if you happen to want to hold this, that was fine too. I would watch for another drop. In other words, if you exited this here, okay, that's fine. This was a better exit here because you got the second drop. Now, if you're still in it, if you're still in the trades that are still out for the period and you're waiting for a third drop, well, you may have to wait a little bit more. You may have to wait. Anyways, we rally today in this. Again, if you're waiting for the third drop, then you may have to wait a period of time. I don't know if the third drop comes tomorrow, you may have to wait a little bit longer. So again, what I'm saying is this is a good exit, even though you would have made more if you held it down. This is still a solid exit. But if you would have looked at the chart and you would have analyzed the chart, you would have seen the things that I saw in here that made me call a bazillion trades in this. And I have been doing that on things that I really see are going to go big or make movements and into different strikes and talk about options trades. And the day trades, when I call the day trade and several options in it and one stock and one symbol, which I did in this and I did in Target, I said to everybody, do them all because it's really good that if I'm calling it all over the place, not just for the day, but for a longer move hold, a bigger move up or a bigger move down. But anyways, getting back to this, this is a good exit too. Ideally, you want to exit a short when the stock is going into the momentum and you want to exit long when it is rallying to momentum. That's a different lecture for another time. But the point is though that if you focused on this, you really did well. And if you're still focused on this, think about what I said. Do well, do well, do well. The problem is that when people are so focused on the losers and not focused enough on analyzing the chart of a big winner, which this was, then it will just take you down a road of total negative thinking and many people do it. Many people do it. Don't criticize it for yourself for doing it, but don't keep doing it. So if you recognize, if I just said what I said and I'm talking to you and this is you doing this crazy stuff, then just say, oh, and you laugh it off and say, tomorrow I'm going to do better. I'm not going to do that anymore. She's right. I will start to focus on the winners, get the most bang for the buck out of the winners, and I can't do anything about the losers. And that's basically trading. Now I will say you have to have more winners than losers. I do have a winning system. The golden gap was how I rate the gap. And I prep in the morning to choose the gaps, whether long or short. But it is a winning system. More trades are profitable than our losers. But you still have to make sure that you really maximize the winners by not exiting them too quick, too fast, too soon, because you're worried about losers. Because again, you're focusing on too much on the losers and you won't make money that way. You won't make money that way in the short term and you won't make money that way in the long term. As long as your risk is set at whatever it should be, according to the size of your account and your own risk parameters, you should be fine. It's when people get outside of that risk that it's a problem. So anyways, if you're interested in the next Golden Gap course, it is September 21st and 22nd. Email me at Melissa at thestackswish.com. Have a great day, everyone.