How To Fail & Not Know It Until It's Too Late | Learn

Date: February 22, 2023

Outline

00:34 - Why you have to understand what you’re looking for before you can make money.

04:16 - Mentorship is a pathway to failure and regret -.

12:30 - When you’re in the tape reading stage, you’re weighing and measuring the price.

15:00 - You have to be flexible, allow yourself to learn, but you’re not going to learn it.

22:02 - The importance of being aware of your character flaws.

24:38 - How do you learn to trust these things?

31:16 - How do you determine a bias within a narrative?

34:04 - The fair value gap formed at the 9:10 candle.

39:37 - If you don’t have a hard line bias if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing -.

43:15 - When you’re not listening, you’re lying.

50:52 - The consequences of being impatient and trying to find a trade -.

57:48 - A short version of the story.

01:00:17 - How does the market really work?

01:06:47 - The Real Estate Master Story -.

01:09:30 - Where are all the profitable students at six months later?

01:15:15 - What it feels like to wake up every day and make no money.

01:18:09 - If you see it after the fact, you don’t know it.

01:25:04 - You can do this, but you cannot do it consistently by rushing into pushing the button.

01:28:38 - Why women are better traders than men.

01:34:28 - You want people to say you’re doing a good job, but they don’t have any evidence to support it.

01:38:00 - It’s not an easy solution. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of work and a lot of cheerleading.

01:43:52 - Don’t have high and lofty thoughts about where you are in your learning.

You may not even understand what you’re looking for right now—you just want to make money. That’s why you’re here, and I understand that. But there are things you must learn and understand before you can ever get to that point.

Core Lesson: The desire to make money comes first, but lasting success requires first understanding the foundational concepts.

If you don’t listen to the instructions I’m giving right now, where do you think you’ll be when we get into the deeper and more technical lessons? If you can’t control yourself and follow simple directions at this stage, you won’t be ready for the advanced material.

You’re reading the tape—we’re watching it live. I’ll direct your attention to a specific price level, and then your job is to watch and observe: how does price react there? Why is that reaction beneficial?

Core Lesson: Discipline in following simple instructions is essential before progressing to advanced concepts. Observation at key levels builds the foundation for deeper technical understanding.

The first 30 minutes you are only observing. You don’t yet have the skill set or ability to trade during that time—you don’t know what you’re looking for.

So what’s the benefit of waiting? That first 30 minutes defines the opening range. After that, either the buy-side or the sell-side liquidity is going to be attacked.

Core Lesson: The opening 30 minutes set the range. Observe, don’t trade. After the range forms, expect either buy-side or sell-side liquidity to be targeted.

You think you’re going to beat this industry with Mickey Mouse effort like that? You can’t even stay off a demo account or stop yourself from pushing the button. We haven’t even been one month into this, and already I see people showing every characteristic that guarantees failure.

Core Lesson: Half-hearted effort and lack of discipline reveal early who will fail. Mastering patience and self-control is non-negotiable in trading.

You didn’t follow the instructions—and those instructions are what lead you to the results you really want. But you think it’s too much work. You say, “I don’t have time for this, just tell me where the signal is, where the entry is, where the stop is.” You’re never going to learn it like that. Never.

My pattern, my specific setup for the day, the morning session, or within a particular fractal of price action may not be the one that fits you. I can’t make it any plainer than that.

Core Lesson: Blindly chasing signals without discipline or process prevents true learning. Not every setup will fit you—your focus must be on building understanding, not shortcuts.

I never said short it. I never said buy. I said watch it. See if price respects that level. Why?

Core Lesson: The lesson isn’t about taking trades—it’s about observing how price reacts at key levels to build understanding and precision.

You don’t take notes when you watch my lectures on YouTube. You don’t take notes while I’m giving these rants.

But I’m teaching you the things you need to understand in these “boring” discussions. How do I know when to act and when not to? When I’m talking to you, you want to see the little squiggly line bullshit—“show me the Fair Value Gap,” the things I’m drawing on a chart. That’s the least important thing.

You think those drawings are paramount, and that’s very frustrating. This is why it’s difficult: the visuals are the easy part. The hard part is understanding why they matter, how price behaves around them, and what the algorithm and the Composite Man are trying to achieve. Learn to see the implied Fair Value Gaps, the wick consequent encouragements, and the institutional orderflow entry drills, but don’t worship the ink on the chart.

The real lesson is the narrative: why price colors outside the lines, why bodies fail to reach midpoints, and why overlapping wicks can create implied gaps that only reveal themselves when you measure consequent encouragement. That’s where the information is—hidden from casual observation and from textbooks.

If you focus only on the drawings, you miss the operational logic: the time-of-day behaviors, the liquidity pools, the stop runs, the high-resistance liquidity runs and how they produce repeated retracements. That context is what lets you interpret the charts rather than react to them.

So take notes. Listen to the explanations. Watch how I connect other markets and timeframes to the move you see on the chart. The patterns you crave are real, but the value comes from knowing the story behind them, not from the squiggly lines themselves.

All I’m asking you to do is observe price from one point to the next. That’s it. The benefit of doing this is you’ll start noticing the things that repeat, the patterns your eye naturally draws to. Whatever makes the most sense to you at your current level of understanding—that’s what you’ll explore further. That way, when you study on your own time, it’s more beneficial.

I’m trying to make you study in the most efficient way possible. But I’m a realist—you can’t just watch a video like it’s a simple demonstration or tutorial and expect to master this.

Core Lesson: The key is active observation. Study what consistently draws your attention, refine it, and use it as the foundation for deeper learning. Passive watching will never build true skill.

You’re trying to make this harder than it needs to be because you’re not willing to listen. That’s a character flaw. This industry is a mirror—it’s going to show you that you aren’t ready.

If you’re watching me in these live streams, calling out levels, pointing your attention to specific things, and telling you to observe at that very moment—that’s not a trade.

Core Lesson: Trading requires humility and discipline. Observation is not execution. If you can’t separate the two, the market will expose that you’re not ready.

You’re watching how price delivers—how it moves from one point of interest to the next within a specific time window. Over time, by doing that repeatedly, you’ll begin to notice things you don’t fully appreciate right now, simply because you’ve seen them play out multiple times.

Core Lesson: Consistent observation builds recognition. Repetition reveals patterns in price delivery that aren’t obvious at first glance.

Tape reading is not trading. Not on a demo, not on paper, not in a funded account, not in a live account. If I’m talking about buy-side liquidity in the first 30 minutes, what you’re doing is weighing and measuring price’s ability to reach that level.

If it doesn’t go there, what did I teach you yesterday? If price fails to reach a specific inefficiency or consequent encouragement near buy-side, that failure shows unwillingness to go higher. So what does that imply? It’s going to go the other direction. You’re weighing which side of the opening range the market is trying to work.

Look at the first 30 minutes of yesterday: where did price spend most of its time? In the upper portion of the range. Yet it was unwilling to clear out the two buy-side liquidity pools I highlighted. So how do you know which side to trust?

I gave you multiple reference points: a five-minute order block, a volume imbalance, and a breaker. How many PD Arrays was that? Three. For the note-takers: remember what I said—when three PD Arrays fail, the move is going the other way.

Nobody said it was a long entry. Nobody said “buy it.” I said watch, observe, study. See if price respects those levels.

You must approach price with flexibility right now—not with rigid expectations about yourself, these livestreams, or what you think you’ll achieve in a week. You can’t think that way. You have to be flexible. Allow yourself the time to learn this. But if you keep pressing for shortcuts, you won’t learn it.

Core Lesson: Tape reading is observation, not trading. Failed reactions at multiple PD Arrays signal direction. Approach price with flexibility and patience, without forcing trades or expectations.

Impatience is going to bury you before you even have a chance to really learn how to do this. You’re going to fail, and you might not even see it. Some of you think you’ll be the exception—and that’s exactly what young ICT thought too. I was humbled over and over again. You will not be the exception.

I say this with love, respect, and genuine interest in your success. I want to see you succeed, I swear to God I do. But you have to let me help you. You have to let the process unfold the way I’m teaching you. If you don’t submit to this process, it’s impossible to succeed—you will fail.

Core Lesson: Impatience destroys traders. Trust the process, surrender to disciplined learning, and resist the illusion that you’re the exception.

Focus only on what I’m bringing your attention to—and nothing else. In your own journal, you can add the extra notes. But during tape reading, don’t bring that extra stuff into the equation or the conversation.

Core Lesson: Stay disciplined in focus. During live tape reading, follow the exact guidance; save personal notes and additions for your own journal afterward.

In the beginning stages, I want everybody on the same foundation. Whether you’ve been doing this for a while or not, whether you’re familiar with what I teach or not—it doesn’t matter. The goal is to get everyone on the same page: we’re just looking at price action. We’re not forecasting the actual high or low. We’re not timing an entry. We’re not doing that yet.

The skill of finding your individual trade setup and entry is unique. Not all of us will have the same entry. When I run sessions where I tell you to use a PD Array with your demo or paper account, I’ll ask you to share your chart showing where your entries and exits were. Most of you won’t want to do that because you’ll treat it like a report card. You’ll be afraid it’s not good enough. Maybe you’ll share it, then delete it after seeing someone else did better. Don’t do that—you’re robbing yourself of the best opportunity to learn.

When it’s uncomfortable, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to feel. Every time you take a trade in a live or funded account, you’re casting your opinion into the abyss of the hard right edge, with no certainty about the outcome. That’s why you need to desensitize yourself now—while everyone is doing the same exercises. Nobody is better than the other. You’re all in the same stage of learning, regardless of how long you’ve been here or whether you’ve been profitable or funded. I don’t care.

Core Lesson: Early learning is about building a common foundation. Sharing mistakes and uncomfortable experiences accelerates growth. Entry style is personal—focus on observation and practice, not competition.

I don’t want to see you fall victim to your own character flaws before you have a chance to cope with them, manage them, and replace them with more positive traits as a trader or speculator.

What you’re doing is watching those moments in price action at the times I prompt you to look. Study them. Ask: does price behave the way you expect, based on what I’ve taught on my YouTube channel?

The order block shouldn’t go past its mean threshold. What if it does? That’s a warning sign. I mentioned the volume imbalance below—what if price cuts through that? It can happen, but now that’s another PD Array failing. And if I said the bullish breaker is in play, but price goes below that too, showing no willingness to support anything there, what is it telling you?

It’s indicating weakness. It’s telling you the market wants to expand lower and seek discount.

Core Lesson: When multiple PD Arrays fail—order block, volume imbalance, breaker—it signals weakness and a likely expansion lower toward discount levels.

You’ll see where I was pointing your attention, watching how price reaches the next level. Then ask yourself: what are you supposed to do with that? What’s the benefit?

Once it gets there and I say, “Screenshot this,” your job is to measure: how much time did it spend before repelling away from that level? Did it start gravitating to another level within five handles? If it offered a five-handle range, was there a setup you could identify inside of that move?

Core Lesson: Don’t just note when price hits a level—study the reaction. Measure time, range, and setups that appear within small displacements to refine your entries.

This morning, I mentioned the Fair Value Gap from the 6:50 candle (New York local time). I wanted to see that Fair Value Gap act as resistance. The market created an up-close candle into that Fair Value Gap, moved away, then came back up again. It spent multiple touches trading into the midpoint of that up-close candle.

For those checking, it was the 10:05 candle—the singular up-close candle and the subsequent candles traded back into both the low of the Fair Value Gap from 6:50 and then expanded lower, reaching into the Fair Value Gap I mentioned below. Price was seeking discount. That 6:50 candle formed the structure, price traded back down to it, and then broke the low.

I said: screenshot this and label it—50% of the trade off here. But I didn’t take a trade. You didn’t take a trade. So what are we doing with all this?

You’re conditioning yourself and logging it. When I taught you how to journal, I explained: you’re giving yourself positive self-talk, conditioning your subconscious after the fact using the reference points I highlight in real time. As the chart creates these levels and reacts to them, you screenshot them. Later, you add your observations—not during. In the moment, your job is to watch price.

Core Lesson: Journaling is about conditioning—screenshot real-time levels, then later annotate observations. This builds subconscious recognition and reinforces pattern awareness without distracting from live observation.

At nine minutes after 10, that Fair Value Gap on the one-minute chart repriced, but it did not return to the Fair Value Gap formed at 7:05. That 7:05 candle was the Fair Value Gap I drew your attention to first—below the breaker, below the volume imbalance, and below the five-minute bullish order block.

We saw price spend most of the first 30 minutes (9:30–10:00) in the upper 50% of that opening range. But what did it do? It failed. It failed to take the 4020.75 buy-side liquidity—it couldn’t get there. Then it showed willingness to move below the low of the first 30 minutes of trading.

So what are we doing? We’re giving the market time to run on buy-side in that opening 30 minutes. Because in that window, you don’t know what it’s going to do—you can’t know.

So how do you learn to trust these things? By following exactly what I walk you through in my tweets and live sessions. But the problem is, some of you don’t want to learn. You want to be spoon-fed. And then, after the fact, you want to lie to yourself about what you saw or didn’t see.

Core Lesson: The first 30 minutes form the opening range. If buy-side fails, expect sell-side to be targeted. Trust comes from practicing live observation step by step—not from shortcuts or spoon-feeding.

And then the move unfolded—you weren’t part of it. You felt regret. You thought you were confused, maybe even tricked, because I didn’t tell you exactly what you wanted to hear. But I am telling you what you need to hear. I’m telling you what you need to study and observe, because you don’t yet have the experience to know what to do in that first 30 minutes.

The first stage of your learning is to submit to that first 30 minutes. That’s part of the process. The first 30 minutes is like the Asian range in Forex—except instead of hours, it’s compressed into half an hour. Just like the midnight opening range, 9:30 a.m. gives you a new one. And after a large trending day, like we had yesterday with a big downside move and targets reached, the following morning session will usually be more difficult. That means you must be extra careful, demand more information, and avoid being impatient or chasing moves.

That’s why you apply a time filter: allow that first 30 minutes to pass. Yes, sometimes it will run 25 handles without you. You’ll miss it. That’s the logic you have to accept. But you resist it, because you want to catch every micro move. You think just because you watched some videos, you’re supposed to do that. That’s nonsense. Nobody told you to do that. I certainly didn’t.

You need realistic expectations. Be diligent about following instructions—what to do and what not to do—and allow yourself to develop under controlled conditions. It’s safe to make mistakes. If I point you to a level and price doesn’t show a trade, you’ll see it later in hindsight—that’s still learning. But don’t press buttons thinking you know what I’m hinting at when I’m not hinting. I’m simply saying: watch this level, note this area. These are my own reference points for determining bias in a narrative.

The first 30 minutes? If I don’t know right away, I also submit to that time. But if I have a strong inclination—for example, that price will run liquidity or imbalance—I’ll act immediately if it shows up, even inside that window. Still, most times after a large range day, the market will hunt buy-side first. Why? Because if it plans to go down, it often purges buy-side first, allowing smart money to build shorts against that liquidity. That’s why I highlighted 4020.75 and 4024. If it doesn’t reach them in the first 30 minutes, nothing has happened.

And remember, I gave you three specific PD Arrays to watch. If you’ve been paying attention and taking notes, you already know what that means.

Core Lesson: Submit to the first 30 minutes. After a big trend day, expect buy-side raids before continuation. Missing moves is part of disciplined learning—focus on observing PD Arrays, not chasing every tick.

👉

If three PD Arrays fail, that’s a problem for your bias or directional view of price. It usually means the market is going to go the other direction.

Core Lesson: Multiple PD Array failures signal invalidation. When three fail in sequence, expect a reversal in bias and direction.

At 10:09 on the 1-minute chart, price repriced into that Fair Value Gap, but it did not return to the Fair Value Gap formed at 7:05. That 7:05 candle’s Fair Value Gap was the first one I drew your attention to—situated below the breaker, below the volume imbalance, and below the 5-minute bullish order block.

Price spent most of the first 30 minutes (9:30–10:00) in the upper 50% of the opening range, and it failed to take the 4020.75 buy-side. It then showed willingness to move below the low of the first 30 minutes. In the opening 30 minutes you don’t know which side will be targeted, so you give the market time to run buy-side.

As price dropped, I said we want to see it go through the Fair Value Gap from the 6:50 candle and, if it comes back, offer resistance there. It then took out the initial low at 10:15. Once that low is removed and we expand to a lower low, a return to the 6:50 Fair Value Gap is no longer necessary. Coming back to that level would be problematic, which is why I noted a hypothetical stop for this idea around 4000.50–4001.00. Price traded to 3991.00 first—allowing a partial near the low—before later returning toward that stop region.

When everything is done, take the information back to the chart and study: what do you see? For some of you, you’ll notice the consequent encouragement of the low in the 9:38 candle, and how price trades up into the Fair Value Gap I mentioned around the 4007s. The originating Fair Value Gap is the 7:05 candle.

Some of you may also see the retracement back into that Fair Value Gap after making the lower low—that’s your optimal trade entry, leaving the first 30-minute range and not expecting a re-entry into it. It already spent the majority of time in the upper half of the opening range and failed to reach buy-side; then it ran below the range low. From a narrative stance, that means price is seeking discount—exploring lower inefficiencies—which is why I drew attention to the 6:50 candle’s Fair Value Gap below price and the old low. After those were taken, 50% of the idea comes off.

Why 3991.75? Measure the initial low of the day at 3995.50 and the 3988.00 level (top of the next New Week Opening Gap I gave you yesterday). The midpoint is 3991.75. As price reached into that zone, you’d screenshot and note your partial there, with a buy-limit at 3988.25 (which allows for 3988.00 if tagged). That would collapse the trade because we had two stages of offset distribution: the market rallied above buy-side around 4015 (see the 1-minute at 08:45; just to the right are relatively equal highs = a buy-side liquidity pool), but failed to reach 4020.75, spent most of the first 30 minutes in the upper half of the opening range, then expanded lower.

If you don’t have a hard-line bias yet, you wait the first 30 minutes and let price tell you what it wants to do. You will not catch the high or the low of the day—and you don’t need to. The first goal is five handles. You should be able to identify where five handles were available in hindsight; if you can’t see them there, you won’t see them live. That’s why I prompt screenshots: in the moment you watch price; afterward you annotate. I’m lending you my experience in real time so you can condition your subconscious—creating the correct “memory” of what to look for at that instant.

This is tape reading: I’m prompting you at specific times when price is doing things that help you learn how it moves from one PD Array to the next—from discount to premium and back—one reference to the next.

You haven’t even learned how to walk yet. Some of you want to run a marathon and carry your friends and neighbors on your back — like you can conquer everything and crave attention — but you don’t have the skill set to command that attention right now. You have to learn how to do this properly. You must filter out the personal characteristics that hurt your trading. As lovely as you may be otherwise, you can’t let impatience and an unwillingness to follow instructions come into your trading. If you can’t follow my instructions, you’re not ready.

You can’t follow the instructions I’m outlining for you. How are you going to learn to do this independently and successfully if you can’t follow directions now? How the hell are you going to follow your own trading plan all the time and never deviate from it if you haven’t disciplined yourself to follow simple instructions? This is where you need to discover those problems in yourself—while there’s no risk, when you haven’t lost money or falsely attributed skill to yourself like I did at 20. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t.

The outcome will be adverse effects—results you don’t want. You’re going to fail at this unless you listen to everything I tell you to focus on while you’re learning. If you do focus on that, you’re giving yourself the fairest chance to eventually get it.

If you keep practicing, you will get it. It will happen. But most people fail because they don’t want to listen in the beginning, or they don’t stick with it long enough. Their expectations of how long it should take to learn are completely unrealistic.

What you’re trying to derive from tape reading is, first and foremost, patience. You’re learning to observe the characteristics of price at specific times of the day. By going into the charts, taking screenshots when I tell you, and focusing on what I point out—“look at this right here”—you’re training your eye to recognize repeating behaviors.

Whenever I say “look at this,” or “focus on here,” or “watch this,” treat it the same as when I say “screenshot it.” At that moment, there’s something in the chart that, as a trader using my information, will resonate with you as a setup. If you’re not doing this, you won’t learn it—it’ll go right over your head.

Core Lesson: Every prompt to “watch” or “look” is a learning cue. Capture and study those moments, or you’ll miss the setups that build your skill.

You didn’t do the things you were supposed to do throughout this year. Discipline is hard—I know. I get that you feel like you want to be more productive. I thought the same way. I thought more was better, that I had to be doing more than just this. But no—just focus on this.

Core Lesson: Discipline means narrowing your focus. More activity isn’t better—consistent focus on the right process is.

When I tried to learn how to trade, every aspect of discipline, personal responsibility, and focusing only on the things I was supposed to focus on mattered. You hone one technique until you can honestly say, “I know this,” and only then move on to the next. That’s the proper way. I didn’t have that when I first started—I was too eager to get out of the rat race. I wanted to stop working for people who were taking advantage of me. I knew they were taking advantage of me, and I still got nothing extra for working six days a week. I know what that feels like.

You might think I’m sitting on a mountain of cash and it’s always been that way. It wasn’t. I came from nothing and had to dig in and go through a lot to learn discipline. I haven’t always been disciplined. It’s genuinely hard for me to maintain rigid discipline—sometimes I’m chemically imbalanced—but I learned it the hard way. Now I’m asking you to do the same: focus on the narrow, difficult stuff first, accept the grind, and build discipline step by step.

A young man decides he wants to become a Jade Master. He journeys a long way to visit a Master of Jade who lives on the other side of the mountain. When he finally arrives, the old man greets him kindly, invites him inside, makes him tea, and presses a piece of green stone into his hand. The young man expects immediate lessons on jade, but instead, the Master talks about unrelated things—life, stories, and subjects that seem foolish to the impatient student. The young man grows restless, thinking, “I didn’t come all this way for this nonsense. Teach me about jade. Show me how to master it.” When he interrupts and demands instruction, the Master quietly takes the stone back, places it on the shelf, and tells him to go home and return in a week.

Confused but still eager, the young man returns the next week. Again, the Master places the jade in his hand, and again speaks of other topics that have nothing to do with jade. The student tries to be more patient this time, but soon his frustration boils over, and he insists that the Master stop wasting his time and show him how jade works. Once more, the Master takes back the stone, puts it away, and tells him to return in a week.

On the third visit, the Master has him sweep the floor while talking about tree frogs. This time, the young man explodes in anger, saying he didn’t come to clean or hear about tree frogs—he came to learn jade. Again, the Master takes back the stone and sends him home for another week. By now the student is both frustrated and nervous.

On the fourth visit, he finally restrains himself. He listens to all the stories without interrupting, but still feels lost. At the end, he admits respectfully, “I’ve listened and done everything you asked, but I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything about jade.” The Master walks to a shelf, pulls down a tin, and tosses the student a different stone. The young man catches it instantly and blurts out, “This isn’t jade.” The Master smiles and replies, “See—you’re learning.”

Only then does the student realize what has been happening. By holding real jade each time he visited, even while impatient and distracted, he was training his senses to know what jade feels like. The Master had been teaching him the most important lesson: patience, respect for the process, and firsthand experience. The young man had been holding the truth the whole time without realizing it.

The story teaches that real learning does not come from shortcuts, demands, or rushing. It comes from patience, daily exposure, and trust in the process. Over time, you come to recognize the real thing without needing anyone to point it out—you know it because you’ve handled it again and again.

“Much like many of you do when I'm talking like this, or I'm doing the dry parts of my lectures in video or in Twitter spaces. You zone that out.”
“I watched a lot of your fucking videos ICT. I have notes. I got notebooks. I got all that shit. Stop talking to me about this dumb shit. Tell me how the market really works. Give me my entry pattern. Give me my setup. Where’s my stop loss? How do I know when the fair value gaps stay open.”
“We don't care about Michael's personal life, tell me about order blocks, tell me about fair value gaps, tell me what the algorithm's gonna do. I'm showing you what the algorithm is going to do. And you're squeezing and grinding your patience against these candlesticks as I'm taking you through it.”
“The story is shut the fuck up, show up every day, take notes, you're going to learn what you're going to learn. But you're going to hold yourself up worrying about shit that has nothing to do with anything. You're learning patience. Tape reading is teaching you patience. It's teaching you how to observe what the algorithm is doing.”
“It’s not realistic for you to know what the algorithm is going to do right now. If I tell you every minute fluctuation in price action, it teaches you nothing. It’s the equivalent of me giving you signals, setups. You need to find your way in these candlesticks that’s going to mean something to you. That’s what is the secret to this.”
“You can’t just take an ABC 123 pattern, model approach system, something that tells you to buy and sell. You can’t trust that wholeheartedly. You can’t feel good about that. No one can. You can lie to yourself and say, Oh yeah, I can do that as long as it makes money—bullshit. You’re gonna have anxiety about the next one, hope it works like the last one did. Whereas when you understand how to read price action, you dismiss that whole notion of ‘I hope it works.’ You don’t need to hope. You’ll know.”

Core Lesson Summary:

ICT uses the Jade Master story as a metaphor for trading. Just as the student learns jade through patience and repeated exposure, traders must learn price action by observing, journaling, and conditioning themselves over time. The lesson is not about quick signals or setups—it’s about building patience, discipline, and the ability to recognize what’s real in the charts without shortcuts.

You’re going to make mistakes. You’ll read it wrong. You’ll internalize it wrong. But that doesn’t undo the central tenets of what makes these markets build price. When you make a mistake, you own it. It’s your responsibility. It’s on you.

The problem is that many of you show characteristics that suggest you don’t yet have the ability to be that responsible, that patient, or even aware that you are learning right now. It just doesn’t feel like it. Why? Because of what you’re measuring it against.

You think the measuring stick for success is getting funded, making withdrawals, spending profits, and having something tangible to show. But what you’re actually getting right now is experience—and you’re getting it at a breakneck speed. You’re being flooded with experience every single day. Yet because it’s happening so quickly, you default back to those unrealistic expectations—the belief that you should be mastering this in a short period of time.

Core Lesson: Mistakes are part of the process. True progress isn’t measured by instant profits or funding but by the accumulation of experience. Patience and responsibility are the foundations that let you turn that experience into lasting skill.

What I’m trying to produce is longevity. I don’t give a fuck if you just get funded—that’s not where this ends for me. I want to change your whole family fucking tree.

Core Lesson: Focus on long-term transformation, not short-term funding; the goal is lasting change that benefits future generations.

I’m teaching you how to make real fucking money—consistently, week after week, month after month, year after year—changing your whole fucking family tree.

You don’t need to go on social media and post bullshit results. You’re living on it. You don’t care who believes what you make. Nobody gives a fuck what other people think when you’ve got money. I don’t give a fuck.

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You are learning how to master money—not be a slave to it.

I’m in an impoverished nation. I didn’t have a father. I didn’t have a mother. I can’t get a job with my college degree. I dropped out of college because I couldn’t afford it.

Didn’t have my father—he was a contract murderer, serving life sentences in prison. My mother didn’t want me. I grew up in a neighborhood considered white trash, the white ghetto. I had everything stacked against me. Everything. I had no pedigree of money before me. No advantages, no people to help me get into certain things, no perfect scenarios for jobs. I didn’t have any of those advantages. I didn’t have this.

Get your head in the fucking game. Focus on this. What are you looking at that shit for? This is what you’re supposed to be focusing on right now. Yes, sir.

I’m giving you a mindset—a way of thinking about it. How to conquer your demons, wrestle with them, pin them, beat their fucking ass. But you have to show up and do everything I tell you to do. And everything I tell you not to do, you need to keep it away. Filter it, cope, whatever you’ve got to do. But you cannot bring your own opinion about what this is, or how you think you should be trained, when you don’t even know what you’re doing as a trader. Do you even know? You don’t have an inkling.

You’d like to be able to trade the 2020 model? Okay. But can you really break down that model? Do you know it like the back of your hand? Can you see it unfold in real time? Or do you only see it after the fact, when the chart is already printed? Because if you only see it after the fact, then you don’t know it yet—you’re still learning. And it’s easy to talk yourself into thinking you know more than you really do.

I teach all sides of it. You’re gonna get the good, you’re gonna get the bad, the sweet, and the sour. And sometimes you’re gonna get a woodshed moment.

When I tell you don’t push a button, don’t even try to push a button. The benefit is you’re going to get so bored with seeing these things or doing all these setups that you’ll lose the impulsive rush—the impatience to act for a monetary reward or out of fear of losing.

You made $50, he made $100 — but what’s that worth if you were sweating bullets the whole time? You didn’t learn anything. You’ll try to ignore the uncomfortable feelings you had during that trade and then sugarcoat it: “Hey, I made money,” and post it on social media. You’ll gloss over all the bullshit you endured for that tiny peanut of a win — a trade you probably can’t repeat because you don’t actually know what you’re doing. That’s the reality, and you know it’s true, even if you’d never admit it on social media.

If we were at a pub or a bar talking markets over a meal, you’d tell me the truth — you’d confess what happened, because there’s no audience to impress or judge you.

You want to tell yourself you can do this before you’re ready, and you lie to yourself about it. Then you do stupid things—try to get a funded account, trade a live account with real funds at risk—when you don’t even have a track record to justify it. Are you consistent? Right now the only thing most of you are consistently feeling is uncertainty about what you’re going to do. That uncertainty is your “consistency.” It’s normal.

But some of you are so uncomfortable with that state that you’ll do anything to distract yourself—just like the young man with the piece of jade, itching to throw it at the Master’s forehead: “Shut the fuck up, I need to do something, I’ve got cars, women, things to entertain.”

Folks who are really trying to make a way for themselves and find a consistent approach to profitability will sacrifice. You must set aside the impulse that says, “I have to rush this because I’m uncomfortable” or “I’m not being productive unless I’m moving fast.” If you rush, you won’t take notes, you won’t study, and you won’t desensitize yourself by sitting through the uncomfortable moments of not knowing. You must tolerate that discomfort until it becomes familiarity.

When it finally clicks, you’ll think, “Wow—I didn’t expect to learn that.” That new perspective will change how you operate as a speculator. Good educators know students must be put into the laboratory repeatedly before meaningful change—learning and understanding—can be observed. Every day I’m giving you that green rock. Some of you want to be alchemists and turn it into money instantly, but you’re not ready, and you’ll get frustrated because you couldn’t rush the process.

Remember: slow down. You can do this, but you cannot do it consistently by mindlessly pushing the button. You don’t have the experience yet to trust that your progress can be measured without pressing the button right now.

You haven’t even learned how to walk yet. Some of you want to run a marathon and carry your friends and neighbors on your back—like you can conquer everything and crave attention—but you don’t have the skill set to command that attention right now. You have to learn how to do this properly. You must filter out the personal characteristics that hurt your trading. As lovely as you may be otherwise, you can’t let impatience and an unwillingness to follow instructions come into your trading. If you can’t follow my instructions, you’re not ready.

You can’t follow the instructions I’m outlining for you—so how are you going to learn to do this independently and successfully? How the hell are you going to follow your own trading plan all the time and never deviate from it if you haven’t disciplined yourself to follow simple instructions now? This is where you need to discover those problems in yourself—while there’s no real risk, before you lose money or falsely attribute skill to yourself like I did when I was twenty. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t.

The outcome of that is the adverse effects you don’t want. You’re going to fail at this unless you listen to everything I tell you to focus on while you’re learning. If you focus on that, you’re giving yourself the fairest chance to get there eventually. If you keep practicing, you will get it. It will happen. But most people fail because they don’t want to listen in the beginning or they don’t stick with it long enough—their expectations for how fast they should learn are unrealistic.

What you’re trying to derive from tape reading is patience and observation. You’re learning to see price characteristics at specific times of the day. When I tell you “look at this,” “focus here,” or “screenshot this,” treat it the same—there’s something in the chart that will resonate with you as a setup. If you don’t do that, it’ll go right over your head. Capture those moments, study them afterward, and let them condition your eye.

You didn’t do what you were supposed to do this year. Discipline is hard. I know—you feel like you must be more productive. I thought the same: “more is better.” It isn’t. Narrow your focus. Do the work I assign. Don’t chase every micro move. The proper way is to master one technique until you truly know it, then move on. When I first started, I was too eager to escape the rat race; I wanted it all yesterday. I had to learn discipline the hard way.

Good students will sacrifice. They’ll put aside the urge to rush through because they’re uncomfortable. They’ll take notes, study, and sit through the uncomfortable not-knowing until familiarity replaces it. When it finally clicks, the perspective you gain will change how you trade. Educators who know how to teach will put students in the lab repeatedly so real change can be observed. Every day I’m handing you the green rock—some of you want to turn it into gold instantly, but you’re not ready, and that impatience will sabotage you. Slow down. You can do this, but not by mindlessly pushing the button.

Think of learning a relationship: if you meet someone you truly want to be with, you don’t show the uncivilized, angry side on the first date. You’re on your best behavior—polite, present, engaged. Trading is the same: don’t show the caveman version of yourself. Don’t trade like you’ve been wearing the same underwear for three days—untidy, impulsive, undisciplined. That behavior will mark you as unprepared and guarantee failure.

I’m giving you a mindset: how to conquer your demons, wrestle them, pin them, and beat their ass. You have to show up and do everything I tell you to do—and keep away everything I tell you not to do. You can’t bring your opinions about how you should be trained when you don’t even know what you’re doing as a trader. Do you really know the 2020 model inside out, or do you only recognize it after the fact? If it’s the latter, you’re still learning. Don’t kid yourself.

You’ll make mistakes. You’ll read things wrong and internalize them wrong—but that doesn’t undo the core tenets of how markets build price. Own your errors; take responsibility. Many of you lack the patience, responsibility, or awareness to even accept that you’re learning. You measure success by getting funded or making withdrawals, but right now the real output is experience—being doused with it every day. That flood of experience makes it feel like you should be learning faster, but the right response is to accept the pace and keep studying.

I want longevity for you. I don’t care if you just get funded—that’s not the endgame. I want to help change your whole family tree. I’m teaching you how to make real money consistently—week after week, month after month, year after year. You don’t need social media applause or to post flashy results; money removes that need for approval. Master money—don’t be its slave.

I came from nothing. No father to rely on, no pedigree, no advantages. I had to dig in and learn discipline the hard way. If I can do it, so can you—but you must get your head in the game and focus on the work I assign. When I tell you not to push a button, don’t try. The benefit is you’ll become so bored with setups that impulsive, reward-driven action disappears. You’ll stop trading out of fear or greed.

If you make a small win while sweating bullets, what did you really learn? Nothing. Don’t sugarcoat that experience on social media. If we were talking privately, you’d confess it—so be honest with yourself. Don’t chase funded accounts or live risk until you have the track record and the discipline. Uncertainty is your current consistency; that’s normal. Don’t let it drive you to distraction.

Show up, take notes, do the work, and submit to the process. You’re being conditioned with repeated exposures—tape reading, screenshots, journaling—so you can one day recognize “real jade” in the charts without being told. That recognition is what turns hope into confidence and makes price action your language.

This lesson is about how personal traits, maturity, and responsibility directly show up in your trading.

Men often trade recklessly. They’ll take oversized bets, gamble, and shrug it off with “if I lose it all, it happens.” That bravado can push them to risk more, but it also creates danger because they don’t measure outcomes carefully. Women, by contrast, tend to be more risk-conscious because of what the speaker calls their “nesting qualities.” As soon as real responsibility enters—like pregnancy or family—everything gets reorganized, managed, and prepared. That instinct for planning and care translates into a more structured, disciplined approach, while men often want to do things on their own schedule, clashing with that orderliness.

As a young man, you might not see it yet. You’re more focused on chasing fun, appearances, and short-term gratification. That same recklessness bleeds into trading—you press buttons out of impulse because it feels good, not because you’re managing risk. But when you reach a stage in life where you hold down a job, build a home, or provide for a child, you learn what consequence feels like. Suddenly every decision matters. If a trading account is the difference between your family eating or not, you stop gambling. You stop saying “let’s see what happens.” You weigh the risk, you think deliberately, and you act responsibly.

The point isn’t to trade in a state of stress, but to understand that real-life responsibilities demand discipline. Trading for your daily needs is not the same as speculating with side accounts. When it’s about groceries, bills, or feeding your child, you can’t afford to be careless. You have to ask yourself: Why am I taking this trade? What’s the risk? What’s the real cost if I’m wrong?

The core lesson: Recklessness is easy when nothing is at stake. Real maturity in trading comes when you anchor your actions to real-world responsibility. That forces discipline, patience, and intentionality. Trading is not about looking flashy or scratching an itch—it’s about managing risk with the seriousness of someone who understands that every decision has weight.

You have to make your trading realistic—it has to be practical, it has to be measured in a grounded, realistic way. And the only way to do that is by following the process as taught: in the beginning, keep it away from the money.

Most of you are going to feel like you’ll never do this, and many of you will absolutely fail. Regardless of what I teach or how I teach it, some will still fail — that’s the reality. It’s hard. If you can’t get out of your own way, you’ll fail. It takes enormous discipline to keep doing the right things consistently and avoid the wrong ones.

Like the young man with the green stone who didn’t realize it was jade, you’re being conditioned now to recognize what’s real. You’re in that moment. Sitting in the chair and listening to these lectures feels uncomfortable because you think you have better things to do: “Fuck this guy, I’m not listening to this bullshit.” That’s exactly the impulse you must overcome.

You’ve got to keep reminding yourself this is a process you must submit to. It’s not easy, it’s not quick, and there’s no shortcut. It takes effort, work, and constant reinforcement — from me, and from yourself. That’s what your journal is for.

Your journal isn’t a place for negativity. It’s your love letter to yourself — writing to your future self with encouragement and belief. Even if you didn’t really see a trade forming, in that journal you write, “I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you. I knew I was going to have a happy life with you.” Whatever your model is, over time you’re conditioning your subconscious to see these candlesticks as a love story. You can’t wait to be in them again, to gaze at their beauty, to watch how they move across the canvas of your charts.

You have to fall in love with this. It has to be a passion that nobody outside of you, unless they’re a trader, is going to understand. When that happens, success is only a matter of time. The small bumps in the beginning won’t bother you anymore. You won’t feel the need to compensate for a lack of visible progress. In the early stages of anything—weight loss, training, martial arts, flexibility—you don’t see gains right away. It hurts because you’re putting in effort without immediate results. You’re sacrificing time with friends and family. It takes your full attention.

Even when you’re not looking at charts, you’ll still be thinking about what you’ve been learning. You’ll be driving, stuck in traffic, imagining the day you won’t need to deal with it anymore because of trading. You’ll think about it constantly. That pressure you place on yourself is already heavy. Don’t add to it by doing foolish things. You’re not supposed to be pressing buttons. You’re not supposed to be gambling. You’re not chasing a participation trophy.

You’re learning patience, building discipline, and conditioning yourself for long-term consistency.

You’re learning—you have no idea how much you’re learning, but you are. In the future, when you look at these candlesticks, they’ll start telling you a story. The moment you see them, you’ll know exactly what to do and when not to touch it.

So I have to stick to what I know works. If you stay with it, you’ll learn. If you give up, you fail. That’s it—there are only two outcomes. You show up every day, put your ass to the grindstone, work and work and work toward this, and fall in love with it.

Every day when you show up and the candles start printing, you’ll be glad you did. Let that passion drive you toward excellence—always striving for deeper understanding, but being realistic about where you are in your journey. Don’t set lofty expectations about what you think you should already know, because in truth, you shouldn’t know much yet. You’re still learning who you are.

The markets act as a mirror. These charts are like a scrying mirror—you cast your own vision into them. In the beginning, you won’t be seeing what the market is really saying. You’ll be seeing what you want it to say, trying to bend it to your will. That’s something every trader must face.

The only way to recognize it is by being in the charts every single day. Eventually, you’ll catch yourself forcing patterns or signals that aren’t really there. Then comes the work: identifying that tendency, coping with it, and overcoming it. Because no matter what I teach or how anyone presents their method, until you conquer that urge to impose your will on the market, you’ll hold yourself back. Otherwise, you’ll rush, force trades, and do reckless things.

The breakthrough comes when you finally stop trying to make the chart prove you right—and start letting it tell you the truth.

You’re rushing to get out there, only to fail and feel miserable. Then you try to patch that wound with a quick win—pushing the button just to prove to yourself you can. But that’s not progress; it’s just compensating for impatience with a temporary fix.

Every consistently profitable trader, no matter how skilled they are today, went through the same dull, frustrating, monotonous beginning. They all hated it. I hated it. Everyone does. You want it to happen sooner, you try to force it, and the only thing that happens is you make the process longer and harder than it needs to be.

You think you’re finding shortcuts, but they aren’t shortcuts—they’re detours that delay your growth. That little hit of encouragement from a forced trade isn’t building discipline. It’s wiring you to chase the same feeling again: It felt good, let me do it again. And that cycle is exactly what buries traders before they ever develop the real skills that lead to consistency.

The truth is, the grind is unavoidable. You can’t skip it. You either embrace the process now—or you’ll keep repeating the same mistakes until you finally submit to it later.

Outline

Keep the lesson connected to your own data.