 Welcome back to the trade hacker mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about trying too hard to make money in trading. 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 episode and talk about trying too hard to make money while you're trading. Sometimes you'll see it in sports as well. I played baseball. I coach my son's baseball team. And sometimes you will see hitters start to really try hard. And it typically comes in a period when they're in a hitting slump, right? So they haven't been hitting as well or they're hitting the ball hard, but it's just going right to the defense. They're catching the ball. And so they start pressing, right? They start trying to change up their swing. They start trying to swing at too many bad pitches. They're trying too hard to get the ball in play. And I see it with traders all the time as well, where they start forcing trades in an attempt to make money. You know, sometimes it takes the form of trading too large of size. Sometimes it takes the form of trading too often. And it just is when you're trying to make things happen. And if we know one thing about the market, if you try to make it happen, it's typically not going to work out so good for you. Remember, the opposite of that is having a mindset where you trade selectively. Only take trades when the odds are in your favor. It's a state of mind where you're letting the market come to you. You're waiting for your opportunity as opposed to pressing and trying to make something happen. And very similar to baseball, you know, when those hitters start to come out of their slump, it's typically because they start to relax. They let the ball come to them. You know, one of my son's biggest issues that he had last year hitting, well, he broke his arm the first week of the season. So he was kind of building his way back. But when he got back, he was he was struggling hitting different than he's ever had in the past. And what I noticed is all his weight was going forward. So when he was was swinging the bat, all his weight was forward. It's like he was so anxious. And he had such a tight grip on the bat that what eventually got him back to hitting better was he had to stay back. He had to wait for the ball to come to him instead of lunging out to try to hit it. He had to loosen his grip on the bat. He had to relax and just let let the ball come to him. Same thing in trading. Sometimes you have to sit back, relax and let the trades come to you instead of trying to get in there and just force trades, force trades all day long. Now I've been trading for over 20 years and I still find myself doing that sometimes. But where I really see it was with traders who come into trading and they have been in some type of very competitive environment in the past. Maybe they were played competitive sports, played, did some type of competitive activity in their youth, had a career that really created success around competition. And now they're coming into trading, trying to apply those same characteristics that made them successful in something else. They try to apply it to trading and it works against them. You'll see traders who they hate losing so much so that they'll do anything it takes to win. But that includes trading poorly. And that's what makes trading so difficult to master is because what you apply in other areas of your life to be successful does not translate in trading. With trading, you have to use more of a controlled aggression. So the way I like to picture it is picture a military sniper, right? They are just sitting back waiting patiently scoping out the situation and only when they have their target dialed in and only at the very right time will they take that shot. As opposed to just coming out and just spraying a machine gun, that's the competitive forcing trades type scenario. Whereas to the most successful traders, they sit back, they wait for their target and they snipe it. And that's where they profit the most. Trading requires that you have a level of control and part of that control is understanding when there's opportunity in the market and most importantly understanding where there is not opportunity. And this is why it is so critical to trade with very rigid rules. If you don't have strict rules in place, you're going to come in and just trade the same way you did yesterday as you did last week today when in fact the market environment might be a completely different place to trade today than it was last week. So you've got to have set criteria. For example, trading options selling premium, we like to do that when implied volatility is high. Well, if I come in and start selling a bunch of premium when implied volatility is extremely low and then we get a spike in implied volatility, guess what happens? The position is not in very good shape. So you've got to use your rules, you've got to use your mechanics in a controlled environment to know exactly when and how to execute those orders based on the environment that you're in. And these rules need to be related to your position sizing and your risk management. There are times when it makes sense to position size up, but there are definitely other times when it makes sense to either not trade at all or trade much smaller position size. And most importantly, when you have these rules in place and you follow your rules so that they're repeated over and over and over, you start to internalize this and it becomes part of you, becomes part of yourself control. If you're getting into a trade with the intent of a, let's say you're trading options, let's say you have a 50% profit target and as soon as you get any kind of profit, you're taking that off. Well, that's not following your rules because then what happens is you're taking a bunch of small winners and then a trade goes against you and wipes out all those small winners that you took previously. Or the flip side of that, you go into a trade and you have a set amount of risk that you're supposed to be taking according to your rules, but you see this setup that just looks so, so good and you ramp up your size to a level that you shouldn't be at based on your account size and your risk tolerance and everything else. And then what happens, of course, by Murphy's law, that happens to be the one loser and it wipes out a bunch of gains that you've had over the previous days, weeks, months, year. The goal with your rules, because if you're like me, a lot of times you don't like to follow rules, right? I'm self-employed because I don't want to follow the rules of a boss. I, sure my parents might tell you, I had a little bit of a problem always following the rules, right? Because we want to do what we want, right? But so you've got to have a mindset around your trading rules that you are setting these rules in place for your own success. And over time, what happens is as you internalize these rules, then they just become habits and you don't feel like you're being told what to do. You don't feel like you're being blocked in. You are simply just following these same habits that you've been doing over and over and over that have been creating the success that you've been having. Because think about how exhausting that would be if you have to make yourself follow the rules. Every single time you place a trade, every time you confront this specific situation, it's going to be exhausting. And your focus and your attention is not going to be on the market and being in the flow of the market. You're going to be in conflict with yourself and focused on battling whether you should follow your own rules or battling when somebody tried to put you in a box when you were younger and follow specific rules and you're having this internal battle, maybe even on a subconscious or conscious level. But it gets to the point where it takes your focus away from the actual trading, whereas if you can get in the flow of it and just have it become a habit, you're not having these conflicting beliefs and challenging thoughts every time you place a trade. Think about when you were a kid. This is just a simple example, and this is an example that I just thought of with my own kids. But every night I have to tell them to brush their teeth still. They're old enough, they know they're supposed to do it. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they're starting to do it. But I have to literally tell them almost every night, go brush your teeth. And so what happens is that's just a little nuanced rule that you might hear. You may still be able to hear your parents telling you, go brush your teeth, brush your teeth at night, brush your teeth in the morning. And it was always kind of an annoyance to you as a child. Well, the same thing with trading, you may be feeling these rules as kind of annoyances. But think about now, at least I hope now you brush your teeth without any issue. At least I do. Every morning when I get up before I go to work, I brush my teeth and it's just part of my routine. It's part of my habits. Before I go to bed, I brush my teeth and it's just part of my habits. I don't feel like it's some type of conflicting rule that I have to follow that somebody's telling me I have to follow. It's just part of my habitual routine. And that is the kind of automatic, that is the kind of motion that you should be feeling when you're applying your rules in your trading. It should become so much a part of you that it doesn't require any special attention or any special effort. So tying that back into the whole pressing or trying too hard to make money, when we are pressing, when we are just really pressing to make money, trying too hard to make money, this need, it kind of overwhelms our rules, right? It overwhelms our governance of these internal rules that we have created. And when do you think pressing or trying too hard normally occurs? Well, just like I talked about in baseball, it typically happens when that baseball hitter is in a slump. Same thing in trading, this trying too hard, this pressing normally happens in situations when we're frustrated with our performance, when we are in a drawdown, when we are not as consistently profitable as we think we should be. I know one thing that I've realized about myself is if I start to try too hard, if I start to press a lot of times, that's because it's not necessarily that I've lost money recently. Sometimes it's because I have missed out on trades. In other words, in talking specifically about day trading, this happens all the time. In fact, just this morning, I had two big trades that I completely missed out on. One was Tesla and one was Zoom. And I just wasn't aggressive enough as far as getting filled and it took off without me. So I was saving pennies and I lost out on dollars. And I didn't, I didn't this morning, I didn't, I didn't let that affect the rest of my trading. But there have been certainly times in the past where if I miss out on trades like that, then I'll start pressing, I'll start trying to get into trades that I probably shouldn't because in my mind, I should already be up a certain amount of money because of those trades that I missed. So that's another scenario that you've got to be aware of where you can't let yourself get caught up in trying too hard to force trades. What we don't want to do is try to create opportunities. What we want to do is respond to the opportunities that the market presents us. Now, I'm not a dancer, but if you're a dancer, you will understand this, trust me, you don't want to see me dance. But if you're a dancer, if you're dancing with the markets, we want the market to lead. If you try to attempt to take control and you try to lead the market and you try to anticipate what's going to happen instead of identify what's going to happen and the market is your partner, you're going to get out of step with your partner. You are not going to be flowing in the motions of the dance like you should be with the market. So to avoid pressing, to avoid trying too hard to make money in the markets, you have to make these rules automatic. And how do you make these rules automatic? Just like brushing your teeth every day, it comes through repetition. One thing that we always tell our new members when they join and they start learning a new strategy, we tell them, make sure that you place at least 100 paper trades before risking any real capital. Now, we're not telling people to paper trades so they can track their performance because we know that fills on paper trades not realistic. We are getting them to do the paper trades so that they follow their rules and start building that habitual, start building the habits of those rules into their, into their internal mindset. So I have a couple of action items that will help you with this. So if you have a pen and paper, write this down. If you're driving, do not try to write while you're driving. But the first thing is make a list of your most important trading rules. So these need to include, I mean, at a minimum, they need to include your rules for risk management. You know, how much capital are you going to use per trade or how much risk are you going to take per trade? It could be your market preparation for the day. It could be you're only going to take very specific setups. It could be things like, you know, if you suffer three losses in a row that day, you're going to be done trading for the day. Whatever it is that, that you feel are your most important trading rules, make a list of those right now. Number two, create a routine every single day before the market opens to review these rules. And while it's fine, if you type these rules out on your computer, I would really encourage you to actually buy hand with a pen or pencil and paper, write it out because just doing that has an impact on your mental state of how you continue to think about that kind of keeps it front of mind more than if you just type it. So I would encourage you at least to start, write it out, and then you can also type it and keep it, keep it on your computer, but review these rules every single day. Say them out loud, do whatever it takes so that you are thinking about it. Put them on a sticky note, stick them on one of your monitors, whatever it takes for you to be thinking about those rules and specifically reviewing them before the market opens, before you start trading. And another cool exercise is think about how powerful the mind is. You can also take these rules, visualize yourself in a specific market situation where you will need to follow the rule. And I'm talking about get specific. Look at your, look at the very specific symbol you would be trading. Let's say you're trading Apple and you're going in with a specific position size and you're managing a trade a certain way. And whatever rules you are doing, visualize yourself actually doing that in the market as if the market was open and you are trading it. And the cool thing about the mind is the mind doesn't necessarily know the difference between what you visualize doing and if you are actually doing it. So by doing this, you're actually creating repetitions in your mind to get you closer and closer to that habit forming situation with these rules without actually having to do it and having real capital at risk. Number three, have some kind of break in your trading day to review these rules. So if you trade in the morning and you trade in the afternoon, let's say sometime around noon, create a, you know, could be a five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute break in your trading day to where you are reviewing these rules. It'll help you clear your head. It'll remind you of what you need to be doing in the afternoon session. If you broke one of your rules in the morning, make a note to make sure you follow it in the afternoon. So create some type of break in your day to review these trading rules. And then lastly, use these rules at the end of your day as kind of a report card at the end of each day, review them, give yourself a grade on how well you performed in your, in the rules that you have written down. Remember, we cannot control our profits and losses, but we can control whether we follow our rules or not. So don't grade yourself based on profits or losses, grade yourself on how good you followed your rules and give yourself a grade based on the old school A, B, C, D or F. Okay. If you don't get an A on that rule for the day, you know, if you get a B or a C or a D or hopefully not an F, you know, use that as your, as your specific goal for the next day for that specific rule to try to get straight As, you know, try to get to the point where you're constantly giving yourself As for following the rules. When you do this, and if you do this consistently, this will, this will take out the tendency for you to press or try too hard during periods of frustration because you start to catch yourself deviating from your rules and you don't want to deviate from your habits. And this will, this will help too. You know, depending on the mood or the mindset you wake up in, I mean, if you have a, if you have a terrible morning, if you have a fight with your spouse or you have a conflict with your kid or, or whatever it might be, these rules and as they become habits are going to bring you out of that state of mind so that regardless of, of what's going on around you, you always will kind of gravitate into these habits, gravitate into these rules. So all these outside distractions won't become as big an issue with your trading, whereas if you didn't have these specific rules, an outside factor could come in and really affect your trading and give you a, you know, one of those days where you just kind of come off the rails and blow up. And that's what we're trying to avoid. So to recap, let the market come to you, relax, act like a sniper, not a machine gun warrior. Make a list of your most important rules. This is going to help you from trying to press or try to you hard, create a routine around these rules, grade yourself at the end of each day with these rules. And I promise you, it'll get you closer and closer to the point where these rules become habits and they're not even hard to follow and it just becomes part of your overall routine. Hope this was helpful. If you want to be a part of a great trading community, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We have hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff, but sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. Community.navigationtrading.com. Look forward to seeing you on the inside and I'll see you in the next episode.