 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about how I structure my trading accounts. 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. So I wanted to jump in and talk to you about how I structure my trading accounts. I'm actually driving right now. I've got a few minutes and a few thoughts. So I figured I'd just jump in and share this with you. So over the years, I've gotten this question and I've never really put it out there as far as exactly what I do. But the questions I get is how do you structure your trading accounts for all the different strategies you trade? Do you trade IRAs, margin, cash accounts? How do you do that? So here's what I do. And trust me, I'm not saying that this is the right way to do it. I don't think there's a right or a wrong way to do it. It's what is right for you, okay? And that's very important because, and by the way, I've changed this structure several times. And in fact, one of the reasons I was thinking about this is I am actually in the process of kind of changing how I structure my accounts. So here's a couple of things first. One, I do not trade in any IRAs. I do have a small IRA that I just have some stocks in that's just kind of a passive account. But the reason I don't have IRAs, a couple of reasons. One, I've always been self-employed. So I've never worked for an employer where I just stocked away money in a 401k. When you contribute to an IRA or a Roth IRA, you have to be under a specific income threshold. Otherwise, you can't contribute or you can't get the tax benefits at least. So I've never contributed that way. Of course, being self-employed, I could have set up a SEP IRA or something like that. But to me, the liquidity or cash account outweighed the benefit of the tax benefits of an IRA, of contributing to an IRA. Because, and I did an episode about this a while back about taking a percentage of my profits out of my trading account every quarter. And so I continue to do that. So if I was in an IRA, I would not be able to do that. And so I don't want to wait until I'm 60 years old to be able to pull money out of my account because I take it out on a systematic basis and so that wouldn't work well. Now, is there anything wrong with trading in an IRA? Absolutely not. Probably a vast majority of you, you know, works for somebody and contributed to a 401k and then either you retired or you left that company and now you've got that 401k that you can roll over into an IRA. And that's a fantastic situation because now you've got a pile of money that you can utilize for your active trading, okay? So that's great, but I'm here to tell you how I structure mine and what kind of the thought process I've had over the years. So I've always contributed liquidity and accessibility to those dollars. And then as far as the other structure, I've always just used a margin account, okay? So I've got several accounts, you know, a couple of them are portfolio margin accounts. So I've got one that's just a cash account, but the majority of them and then a couple of other that are just regular margin. So here's why I have multiple accounts, okay? So let me break this down. Number one, and I've been kind of sharing this with seven or eight months, six, seven months, I have one account that I only trade micro futures in and I only trade the navigation trend trading strategy. Okay, so that's an account that I funded in August of 2021. At the time of this recording today, the 22nd of April. So I think that's about seven months and that account has more than doubled. I've kind of shared those statistics with you all a couple of times. So I did that for a couple of reasons. Number one, I just wanted to try out, and number two, I wanted to come on the navigation trend trading strategy, okay? So that's one account. And so is day trade. So I never hold any positions overnight. I never mix in any of my other strategies into that account that for me, I believe having separate accounts makes a lot of sense. For me, it just, you know, when I'm in day trading mode, that's all I'm trading in it, okay? Then I take off my day trading hat type trades and I start doing our navigation trend trading. And so I'll place my orders in my futures trend trading account and I have another options account that is actually a mixture of some option trend trades in. I do some, you know, income trades, like strangles, iron ducks, double calendars, all that stuff. So it's kind of mixed up in different strategies and I use, and that's in toss. And so I use the monitor tab to kind of group those different strategies to keep them separate, even though they're being traded all in all in one account. And then there's another account that's just for the navigation trading alerts that I trade, you know, and obviously we trade all the different strategies in that that you get alerts on and so that's a separate account. Now, going back to my other personal stuff, the other thing that I've been considering is actually opening because I'm transitioning a lot of my trading onto the trader platform because they have unlimited commission free trading on all equities and equity options. And that's a big deal. As much as I trade, commission becomes a significant factor. And on the day trading alone, you know, when I was trading on toss or tasty works, I was racking up anywhere between four and $10,000 a month in trading commissions. So switching over to Orion and Trader, now I have zero trading commissions each month. So that's really nice. Now I've also been doing a lot of active trading with one of our newer strategies both on the double calendar side as well as the butterfly woodpecker side. So that's creating a significant amount of commission as well. So I've been kind of transitioning those over to a trader account. And so now I've got two trader accounts. One is for day trading and the other one is for swing trading but I haven't completely segmented that into a specific strategy. So my plan is I'm gonna be actually setting up a couple additional trader accounts. And so these are margin accounts. These are for options trading. Here's part of it for me. I do not love just in detail documentation of every single trade that I make. I don't love that, okay? And if I have to do that, if I have to have this massive spreadsheet with detailed entry and exit prices and, you know, all these different data points, I know a lot of you guys love that and that's great. I wish I loved it more but if I have to do that then I would rather not trade that much. That for me, it's that big of a sticking point. And so for me, if I can just segment the different trading strategies into a separate account, well then the accounting of that becomes very easy, right? I can track the profit and loss. I can download my trade log, if I wanna export it into a spreadsheet and then do the analysis and find situations where I did good, did bad. I can take notes, I can document. You know, that is something that I am okay with. It's just the spending hours and hours and hours on the different trades that you took in the, you know, all the little micro details. I just don't, I'm just not interested in doing all that, okay? So, because I already keep a trading journal and so I'm documenting trades that way. I document, I have, you know, part of that is a mindset journal. So I'm already doing so much mental and trade analysis in the way that works for me that I don't need another 18 spreadsheets with 54 algorithms and things like that to keep track of my trades. It's just that I have zero interest in that. So a couple of things. One, you know, I think it's very possible, even if you trade a lot of strategies like I do, it's very possible to keep it simple if you wanna just have one account. But on the backend, manually, I think you have, if you're gonna do that, you have to be the type of person who wants to keep very detailed records in a spreadsheet so that you can document all this stuff. For me, I would rather have 20 accounts, one for each strategy that I trade and then not have to do the manual backend spreadsheeting stuff, okay? So that's, again, that's just a personal preference. Like I said, there's not a right or a wrong way to go about this. There's what's right for you. So I think that's about it. I just, I kind of wanted to share those thoughts. So my idea is right now I've got separate accounts for a lot of different things, but I still have a few accounts that I co-mingled different strategies in. And I'd like to get that really segmented into separate accounts, and that way I can just toggle between the account, place the specific strategy and it'd be good to go. Now, I know upfront and you need to know upfront. If you use that approach where you do have multiple accounts, there are times when you forget that you're looking at one account and you place a trade and it goes into the wrong account. And I've done that. In fact, I did that a couple of weeks ago where I placed a trade. I thought I was placing it in my personal TOS account. I actually placed it in the navigation trading TOS account. And so I just had to go in and close it out of one account and reopen it in the other. So not a huge deal, but you will run into that. So that would be one of the downsides of using multiple accounts that sometimes you will be, you know, forget that you're in one account and you'll place the trade in that account and have to fix it. So anyway, I hope this was helpful. If you guys have any questions or any thoughts about how you manage your different trading accounts and how you structure those, I would love to hear it. Just feel free to post in the Trade Hacker channel where this podcast is posted in our Discord community. And if you wanna be part of the Discord community, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We've got hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff, but sharing trade ideas and thought processes and things like we're talking about today. All great stuff. We'd love to have you in the community. Look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.