 This is Mark Douglas, Trading Psychology. This helped me out so very much, so I am sharing it with you. This helped me think of trades in groups, not in individual trades, and it also helped me disassociate my identity, my fear with trades. Enjoy. To be able to create consistent results, the kind of results that you can rely on as an income, you're gonna have to learn an edge. You're gonna have to acquire a trading methodology that gives you an edge. I'm defining an edge is that there's a higher probability of one thing happening over another. That's what an edge is, and we're gonna learn the nature of probabilities here in a moment. You're gonna have to have a plan on how you utilize that edge, meaning what the risk is, position size, and profit objectives. Then you're gonna have to be able to execute, you're gonna have to get to the point where you can execute that edge without making errors. For you to be able to execute that edge without making errors, you're gonna have to learn how to trade from a carefree state of mind, meaning you're going to have to aspire to the point where you can trade without fear. And to trade without fear, you're gonna have to learn how to think in probabilities. That's basically where we're going here. And I said this primary skill was learning how to trade without fear. Learning how to trade without fear is a function of learning how to think in probabilities. Meaning we're going to set aside or move from thinking in a trade by trade mentality. In other words, what this trade is gonna do for me right now, am I right or wrong on this trade? And we're gonna move to a series of trades perspective. Because that's what your methodology does anyway. Any trading methodology just gives you a win or loss ratio over a percentage of trades. In other words, if I take the same criteria that's in any kind of mathematical, any kind of technical formula that's mathematically based, or a technical price pattern that you would be able to see visually. What we're going to learn is that my edge, meaning a higher probability of one thing happening over another, is simply going to give me a higher win rate over a series of trades. Let's say the next 20 trades. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. And that the actual, on a trade by trade basis, I don't know which one's gonna win or which one's gonna lose in advance. There is no way for me to find out. There's no way for me to determine that. That on a trade by trade basis, no matter what reason or rationale that you come up with, is that there is no way to assure yourself that it's going to be a winning trade. There's nothing that can tell you that. That trading methodologies give you a win percentage. Let's say 70% of the next 20 trades are gonna be winners. There's no way, I'm gonna know, which of the 70, which 12 or 13 are gonna be the winners, or which six or seven are gonna be the losers. What you're going to learn, and this is what traders, the professionals have learned, is that there's a random distribution between wins and losses over any given set of criteria that define your edge. There's a random distribution. I will get a higher percentage of wins to losses, but I just don't know which trades are gonna be. It requires a complete shift in the way you think about trading. When you make this complete shift, everything about your trading will change. When you have genuinely integrated these concepts into your mental system at a functional level, your fear will go away. All you have to do is commit yourself to learn how to think about trading in another way, and your fear will go away. Because what we're gonna learn is the correlation between what we believe and what we feel. There's a direct correlation between if I'm going into a situation with a certain belief that let's say that my particular edge is going to tell me what's going to happen on this trade right here, I wouldn't even put this trade on unless I thought I was gonna win. When you really understand that, you will never think that way again. And that is one of the biggest problems that most the typical trader has. Let's say the typical screen-based trader is that they really don't understand the nature of how prices move and the underlying dynamics. Because you haven't had the exposure. You haven't had the exposure to the direct markets. See, because when we pre-define our risk, let's put it this way. If I'm a typical trader operating out of the four fundamental fears, the fear of being wrong, the fear of missing out, losing money, et cetera, we got a real problem here because our minds are naturally wired to associate. In other words, our minds will automatically make connections, meaning this, that if I get into a trade and I end up being wrong, I expect it to win and I'm wrong. I have to admit that I'm wrong. It isn't just admitting that I'm wrong on this one trade. Our minds, because the way our minds are wired, it has the potential to tap us into the accumulated, the accumulated negative energy of every time I've been wrong in my life. Okay? So if this circle represents a huge ball of negative energy inside of our mental environment about what it means to be wrong, being wrong on just one trade could tap us into that pain. And it's gonna work differently for everybody. Everyone's minds works a little bit differently. But that's the potential. If you wonder why people seem to live and die on the outcome of the next trade, this is one of the reasons why. This is why it's so important because it has the potential to tap us into the accumulated negative pain of every time we've been wrong in our lives, every time we've lost something in our lives, every time we've missed out on an opportunity that we didn't take advantage of, every time we've been in an opportunity and didn't get the maximum amount that was available. Those are the four fears. So the problem with pre-defining our risk is this. Is that if I'm afraid of being wrong, and I don't know how to think about trading appropriately in a probabilistic mindset, I'm not gonna get into this trade unless I think I'm right. Why do I have to put a stop in the market and pre-define my risk if I know I'm gonna win? A professional trader just doesn't think that way. They would not, I'm not saying that they never thought that way. I'm not saying that they didn't experience the exact same thought process that I just took you through. I'm saying they have evolved beyond it. They would never allow themselves to get into a trade without pre-defining the risk.