 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I wanna talk to you about why your trading might not be consistent. 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 why your trading might not be consistent. Every trader's goal is to be consistently profitable. Now, that means different things for different traders. You know, some people use strategies that have a very low probability, so they have a low winning percentage, but it has a higher payoff on the winners. But over time, they are consistently profitable. Other traders, and I would put myself in this category, use higher probability strategies. They have a lower profit per trade, but our win rate is higher, 70, 80, sometimes 90% depending on the strategy that we're trading. And that creates consistency. So every trader's goal is consistent profits, or it should be consistent profits, or I'm not really sure of the purpose of you trading. But the question is, if you are not consistently profitable, why not? And I think a lot of people, the first thing they go to is, well, it's the strategy that I'm trading. Right, I'm trading the wrong strategy. That's why my profits are not consistent, and you find yourself jumping from strategy to strategy, from indicator to indicator, from guru to guru, and you're always in this loop of trying to find what's consistently profitable because you think it's the strategy. Now, I'll tell you this just bottom line, it's most likely not the strategy. I mean, we have 15 plus different strategies that can produce consistent profits. So it's most likely not the strategy. So if it's not the strategy, if you actually have a strategy that has an edge that you can create profits with, why are you not consistently profitable? And I would guess for the vast majority of you listening, one of the main reasons that you're trading may not be producing these consistent profits is because you are not consistent in other areas of life. You are not consistently trying to get better and improving other areas of your life. Now, I'm not standing on a pedestal saying, oh, I'm so good at this. In fact, the whole reason that this is front of mind and why I wanted to share this with you is because recently I started a program called 75 Hard and I did a podcast episode a while back and now I am on day 41 of 75 in this program. Now, I'm not gonna talk a whole lot about the details. I did a whole podcast episode right when I started that you can go back and listen to. But the basics are, here's what I have to do every single day on this program. Number one, I have to work out twice a day for at least 45 minutes, okay? And they can't be consecutive so I can't just work out for an hour and a half and call it good. They have to be separated by a few hours. So, and one of those workouts has to be outside. So regardless of the weather, regardless of the situation, you have to complete at least two 45-minute workouts per day and at least one of those has to be outside. Number two, I have to drink a gallon of water a day, okay? Number three, I have to read at least 10 pages from a non-fiction book, some type of book that's going to make me better, okay? It can't be a fiction book about Harry Potter or anything like that. It's gotta be some type of self-improvement, autobiography, somebody successful, something like that, something that's gonna make you better, okay? Next thing, I have to take a progress pick of myself every single day. So this whole challenge is not a, it's not like a fitness challenge. It's more of a mental discipline challenge. However, you have to take a progress pick of yourself every day so that you can see the progress from a health standpoint because one of the other things that you have to do is you have to choose some type of meal plan. You have to choose some type of diet that does not include any cheat meals or any cheat days and zero alcohol, okay? So I've been doing this. Like I said, I'm on day 41 of 75. If I miss doing any one of those, I have to go back to day one, okay? So what this has done and going back to the topic of this episode is it has created a crazy amount of consistency. Consistency in a lot of different areas of my life that I didn't have. One of the reasons that I started doing this was because, A, my trading has been going really well. I had hired a trading psychologist and I've really just been digging in and going all in on the mental side, the mindset part of trading. And I've seen just massive, massive improvement in my overall trading. And so when I got done with those sessions, I wanted to do something else to keep it going. And I came across this 75 hard and heard a lot of people talking about it and how it had changed their lives and all these different things. And so I looked at that as another good way just to kind of keep me on this train, keep this train moving on this profitability that I've been seeing in my trading. And so what I've found, and I didn't really truly understand what the benefits of this 75 hard program would be, but the results have been way beyond what I thought it would be. I mean, literally a transformational type situation in so many different areas of my life and the consistency of what you have to do. Think about this. So I have to work out twice a day. I have to, because of the market open, because of everything I'm obligated to with navigation trading, because of everything that I need to do, I have to get a workout in early. So I have to wake up at 4.30 a.m. to get that morning workout in. So there are definitely evenings where I need to go to bed early, because if I stay up late, I'm not gonna wanna get up at 4.30, right? So it starts the evening before where I need to go to bed early so that I can make sure that I'm getting up and I'm not groggy and super tired when I get up. And, but there are so many different times where that evening before I'm like, ugh, I gotta do this again. I gotta do this every day. I gotta do this on Saturdays and Sundays and in every, I mean, it's every single day relentless consistency. And what I've found is that each time I do it, you have this crazy sense of accomplishment because there are so many times where I don't want to do it, but I still do it. And that's the basis of creating consistency. Doing it over and over even the days, even the times where I don't want to do it is what creates some of this transformational stuff that I'll be talking about, okay? The other thing it does is it breaks bad habits. So I got into a bad habit in the evenings of being on my phone too much, eating junk food, just not doing anything to make myself better, right? I mean, it just, and I just got into this rut where I've just get home, I was tired, I was exhausted, I'd been working all day, been doing different stuff with my kids, activities and blah, blah, blah. And I just got into this bad habit of just thinking, you know what, I deserve this. I deserve to relax. I deserve this junk food. I deserve to just sit on my phone. I deserve to whatever. And so I created a lot of bad habits. And so what this program has done is helped me really break almost all those bad habits that I had. And then the reading part, you know, again, this is, I didn't do this for a fitness challenge. I wasn't trying to lose weight. I did it for the mental discipline side. And one of the things that, you know, I didn't really have, think would, I didn't even think about as a major factor into this whole thing. But one of the things, as I mentioned that I have to do every day is I have to read 10 pages of a book. At least 10 pages of a book that's going to make me better, something that's gonna help improve me. And I used to read a ton. I mean, I used to read a couple of books a month at least. And that's one of the bad habits that I fell into. I stopped reading. I stopped reading books on a consistent basis. I mean, literally I probably hadn't read, I'd probably read maybe one or two books in the last couple of years. And whereas before I was knocking out a couple of books a month. And what I've found is that since I started reading, now I've, you know, 41 days in, I've already finished three different books. And the consistency that that provides is you are consistently feeding your mind with positive things, okay? Whereas before there, you know, your mind is going to absorb whatever you're doing, right? So whatever I was doing, which was nothing good. I mean, it wasn't like I was doing anything really air quotes bad, but I certainly wasn't feeding my mind with positive information. And so the fact that I started consistently feeding my mind with this positive information. By the way, a couple of books that I read that I think every single, not only trader, every single person should read is number one, Don't Hurt Me by David Goggins, okay? I'm not gonna go into a lot of details here. Just trust me, go buy it on Amazon, go find it, read it. The second one is Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Annie Duke was a professional poker player and she wrote this book of Thinking in Bets. It's all about like Thinking in Probability. So specifically as a trader, you need to read that one as well. There's a couple of other good ones. Ray Dalio's book called Principles is a good one. I'm not quite finished with that one, but that's another good one as well. But what's happened is all of these consistent things that I've been doing for my mind, like feeding it with positive stuff from the books, that's had a significant just improvement in my overall perception of different things, my perception of life, my perception of if I'm having a bad day, if I have a bad day trading, for example, feeding your mind with those positive aspects, feeding your mind with that positive information, it helps you deal with negative situations better, okay? So that's one. And then just helps, it gives you different perspective on life. I mean, I literally, I have a better relationship with my wife. I have a better relationship with my kids. I have a better, if all these little nitpicky things that when I was in this rut of just having these bad habits and eating junk food and everything else, little things would set me off. Little things that my wife or my kids would do would like irritate me. And a lot of that is just vanished. I mean, it literally has vanished and it all just comes from perspective, having more energy, feeding my mind with this positive information. So the reading aspect did that. Now on the physical side, because I'm physically working out every day, the meal plan that I chose, I just, I chose the, I didn't really know what to do. I just chose the keto diet. So the keto diet is made up of large amounts of quality fats and proteins and very low carbs. And so the fact that I've been consistently on that program now for 41 days has created a situation where my body just feels healthier. I just feel better. I have more energy. I have more focus. I don't get tired in the afternoons. I want to take a nap. I just, I have more clarity. I have all these different things. And then obviously the two workouts a day is a huge health benefit as well. And so those together, when I got on this, I was not trying to lose weight. I think the highest weight that I saw here recently before I started was weight about 187 pounds, which it's a little bit too much for me, for my frame, for what I'm used to. But I wasn't fat. I wasn't super overweight. But consider this, I've lost 20 pounds. So when I weighed myself this morning, I weighed 168. So I lost 19 pounds, not even, and that wasn't even the goal. And what's interesting about that is, and trust me, I'm gonna tie this all back to trading but so bear with me. What's interesting about that is after the first, I remember it being about, especially like 14, 17 days. So about the first two, two and a half weeks, I was like, huh, you know what? I can't really tell any difference in my body. I haven't lost any weight. At that point, I had lost no weight at all. So I just kind of like, huh, that's interesting that I haven't. I just kind of thought that I automatically would by that point, but I hadn't. And then what's amazing is about week four, about week three and a half or four, all of a sudden, you know, I'm taking these progress picks every day and then I look back at day one versus at that point, about three and a half, four weeks in, and I was like, wow, there actually is a huge difference. And at the same time, pounds just kind of started shedding off and literally like my midsection, like the old love handles. I mean, they literally just started melting off to the point now or in day 41, I look completely different than I did 41 days ago. And it all comes down to that consistency and doing it for not only consistently each day, not just for a short period of time, but for now 41 days in a row, the changes that have happened are crazy. I mean, I don't know how else to describe it. It's just, it's phenomenal. And so that goes back to tying it back to trading. How does that tie to trading? Well, I know a lot of people who will try a strategy for a week, five trades, 10 trades, 20 trades. And if it doesn't show the type of profit that they think it should, they move on to the next one. Okay, what if you traded that every day for three months? What if you traded that every day for six months, for a year, would the outcome be different? Well, the answer is absolutely. I mean, trading is a game of probabilities. Trading is a game of number of occurrences. So there's no way you can even figure out what the probabilities of a trade are by trading it five times or 10 times or 20 times. You've got it, you've got it. That's why we teach people, when you start trading a strategy, you need to trade it in a paper trading account at least a hundred times before you even think about risking real capital, okay? And the other thing about the consistency of it is you will figure little things out about the strategy and yourself and your own personality around trading when you do it consistently for a longer period of time. Okay, think about this. One of our strategies, we call the Iron Duck. If you just started trading that strategy, right now we are in the midst of a massive downturn in stocks. And so that Iron Ducks rate, it has a pretty big buffer to the downside where you can still profit, but when the market goes into a free fall, you're gonna get pushed out of some of those ducks for a loss. We call it getting smoked out of our ducks. And so we've gotten smoked out of a few of those ducks. Well, if you just started, and that's happened, are you, and you did five trades and you made money on one out of the five, but we're in a specific environment that created losses in those, are you gonna have a judgment about that specific strategy based on a few trades in a very specific type of market environment? Whereas if you've traded that strategy over the last few years, you would know that it's very, very consistently profitable over time. You're gonna have periods like we're in right now where you're gonna have a drawdown, but every strategy has a drawdown. There's no strategy that is so dynamic that it's gonna profit in every single market environment. And that's why we're so big of advocates of having multiple strategies, mastering one at a time, but having a few different strategies that you can implement in different market environments or are going to offset each other in different market environments to create that consistent income. And so it all comes back to what I said at the beginning of why you might not be consistent in your trading. And it might be, okay, don't close off. It might just be that you're not consistent in other areas of your life. Do you think that if you are just kind of random off the cuff and just no real direction in other things that you do, why would you expect that when you start trading, that all of a sudden that you're gonna become consistently profitable? So if you're not consistent in your trading, what else in life can you do to create consistency that might pour over to your trading? Because while I had a lot of bad habits prior to starting this 75 heart program 41 days ago, I still had a lot of consistency as well. And that showed in my trading, right? I mean, my trading had been doing very well. But since I started this consistency 41 days ago in all of these different areas of my life, it's taken my consistency in my trading to a whole another level. And I never really thought about it like that before, until now. I never really thought about how consistency in other areas of my life would create consistent profits in my trading until now. And so I wanted to share this with you all because I think it's a huge unlock. I think it's a huge deal for you to focus on and to help you improve your trading consistency. Now, am I telling you to go out and do the 75 heart program? Well, yeah, kind of I am. I mean, if I would have known how I would feel and how much you would actually transform and improve my life, I would have done it a long time ago. I've heard about this thing for a couple of years and I would always blow it off. Like, oh yeah, I'm not doing that. Like I can't have a drink. I can't have a drink with my buddies. I can't have a beer and a barbecue and that kind of thing. Or there's always some type of an excuse if you knew what it would do for all aspects of your life. A lot more people would do it. In fact, when I was getting ready to actually start doing it, I started April 1st of this year, I asked over 30 people if they wanted to join me. And guess how many said yes. Zero, none, none, friends, family, everybody, none. I did do a podcast about it. I posted about it in our community. And guess how many people joined me? One. So me and one other person are doing it. We've got a couple other people who are doing modified versions of it as well, which is awesome. But the discipline of doing the consistency every single day when you don't want to is part of the key of why it's been so transformational. So I would highly, highly recommend doing it. If you're not going to, if you're not quite there yet, because listen, it took me two years to build up to decide I was actually gonna do it. Okay, it's not easy. It's called 75 Hard for a reason. So if you're not there yet, if you're not quite there, like, yeah, I'm not interested in doing that, I would still recommend finding some way to do something or a set of some type of activities and be absolutely consistent. Even if you don't feel like doing it, it's your standard for the day. You have to do that when you wake up, between the time you wake up in the morning and by the time you go to bed, you have had to accomplish X tasks, whatever they are, things that you know will make you better but you don't wanna always do, pick those and do them over and over and over again. And in my mind, it's gotta be over a month. You gotta do it for at least 30 days. Like I said, I didn't even start seeing any transformation until I got to that 30 plus day point or a little bit less. But so I would suggest, you know, do it for 75, do it for at least 50 and see what happens because I promise it will create something inside of you that's going to create a sense of accomplishment of getting it done even when you don't want to and it's gonna pour over into your trading. It's gonna pour over into other aspects of your life. You're gonna start doing other things that you didn't think you wanted, that you don't feel like doing because you know how good it feels when you get it done and it's just going to create a spiral of good things to come. And I should say a snowball that just keeps accumulating of good things. It's not only gonna improve your trading but other areas of your life. If you wanna join the Trade Hacker community, go to community.navigationtrading.com. We've got hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis. Not only about this mindset stuff, sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.