Through The Looking Glass

Date: February 26, 2023

Outline

01:02 - Interview with the shark.

03:03 - Bipolarism, mood swings, mood swings, and rage.

06:31 - When you’re trading and you have all of these concerns about making money or fear of making a losing trade or failure.

13:56 - You don’t appreciate it until you’ve experienced it.

16:42 - How to get people to warm up to what you’re teaching.

21:15 - You need to make your house ready -.

28:12 - What style trade are you going to be?

31:17 - What is a fair value? -.

35:16 - How do you know which one is going to form today?

42:59 - The worst thing you can do is be inspired by me or anyone else to go out there and try to trade and feel like you're ready.

47:18 - What are you seeing through the looking glass?

51:44 - You don’t know when you’re going to hit that weight loss goal.

58:36 - You’re going to work your ass off in this industry no matter what you do.

01:02:52 - What do you see when you see through the looking glass?

01:10:37 - They don’t know what the next turn is going to be, they don’t know what’s going to happen.

01:14:12 - Don’t let other people get inside your head and take your mind off what you’re looking for.

01:18:18 - Patrickwhelan’s “rollercoaster of emotions”.

01:23:25 - What happens when you demand more than what the model can provide.

01:26:55 - Do three handles for months until you find that level of comfort.

01:30:40 - The importance of having more than one way to get into the market.

01:38:06 - How to get to the point of never fearing missing a move because I see them coming at all angles.

01:41:07 - Your job as a trader is not to predict price, but to react to price.

01:44:20 - Your job as a trader is not to predict price, it’s to be ready to react to it.

01:49:44 - What are you doing when you talk about other people?

01:53:03 - Show me what you’ve been doing.

02:01:06 - You have to understand the person that’s going to fuck this up for you.

02:03:35 - What you’re trying to turn trading into is image-based image-based worship.

02:07:13 - If you don’t have to trade well, you can’t expect to do grand slam home runs day in and day out.

02:16:17 - What happens if that choppiness is in dollar and you're a forex trader?

02:19:53 - You’re like a drug addict.

02:22:43 - When you’re looking at old data, you’re drawing an affinity for a pattern.

02:29:58 - Why you need to have a plan.

02:34:29 - Reverse engineer all the price movements.

02:38:03 - Why you need to listen to everything you’re told.

02:45:00 - If you do all the things right, you’re going in the right direction -.

02:49:13 - Observing the process of being there -.

When you're trading with concerns about making money, fear of losing, or pressure from your own expectations—or the expectations you think your family and friends hold—it becomes difficult. I used to fear the entry itself, worried about choosing the “wrong” entry. But there is no wrong entry. You just have to engage. Sometimes a trade will be profitable, other times it won’t, and you must remain indifferent to the outcome.

If you’ve never traded with live funds, the first time may trigger an anxiety or panic attack. You might feel heart palpitations, like you’re having a heart attack, about to pass out, or even get sick. That overwhelming fear happens because of over leveraging. Often it comes right after impulsively entering trades to recover from a big drawdown—the last gamble before inevitably blowing out the account. Trading forty contracts might make you look smart briefly, but when it fails, the panic hits, and you can’t catch your breath.

These panic events always tie back to the same root: being impulsive about money. That’s why I want this year of teaching to leave a lasting impression—not just to entertain you. The title of this lecture, Through the Looking Glass, came to me after receiving an email from a failed student who tried to blame me. I told him straight: take responsibility. No one can argue against the fact that what I share beforehand plays out logically, consistently, and with precision in the marketplace.

Some may look “through the looking glass” and see more than they expected—that’s my audience. I set expectations, then deliberately over-deliver, pulling back the curtain a little more to show the precision and predictability you can lean on. Maybe you can’t trade it flawlessly yet, but you’re learning.

When I talk about submitting to trades intraday, many students say in the comments that they can see exactly what I describe, and they feel empowered. That’s what I’m trying to condition you toward: confidence that comes from seeing things unfold as explained beforehand. Motivation only works if I can consistently show you what will happen before it does.

When you’re in the presence of live commentary—where I’m explaining, “This is what it should do, watch this here, it should do this, it shouldn’t do that, we want to see this, we don’t want to see that”—it communicates foresight. It shows the ability to forecast outcomes that would otherwise be unknown. When you witness it unfold in real time, whether during a live session or from my tweets, and then later see it reflected on your own chart, you’ve looked through the looking glass. That experience builds awe at the precision and consistency of price delivery.

This should remove fear or the sense of “them against us.” Instead, it brings our focus to aligning with the intentions of those who move the markets. You’ll never beat the market maker, but you can learn to move with them. My role is to show you the concepts that get you in and out safely, while others are caught off guard. Drawdown will happen, mistakes will happen, but that doesn’t mean the model fails or that “they’ve changed things.” If you feel panicked, it’s often because you’re focusing on the wrong narrative. The real power is in learning to be correct, to be on the right side of price.

When I speak about trading, I’m passionate, but not euphoric or fearful. I’ve been here before, so I’m not scared of being wrong. I know what’s likely to happen next, and you’ve seen it unfold many times. My teaching is not about instilling fear—it’s about respecting risk without being paralyzed by it. The world will bring uncertainty, and no one can stop that, but trading skills can prepare you to face it.

In practice, there are many approaches—scalping, day trading, holding overnight, swing trading. Each has its risks, and right now swing trading carries huge gap risk. For example, we may open on Sunday far away from Friday’s close because of the liquidity pools above Eurodollar or below dollar. That can shape the week dramatically. This is why I spend weekends scanning headlines, staying aware of global events, not in a panic but simply prepared.

Throughout the week, as we study charts together, you’ve seen how these ideas materialize in price action. When I call out levels on Twitter, the experienced students recognize when I expect a specific run or target. It’s not ambiguous—I’m pointing to a PD Array. New students might think “fair value gap” means a buy, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s simply the next area of interest, and I want to see whether price respects or violates it. That’s the narrative, and it has to be observed live.

Narrative cannot be taught from a book or a few tweets—you have to see it unfold in real time. That’s why this year is such a challenge for me: finding a way to reach as many of you as possible, even though some may not connect. It’s why I ask for your prayers—that I succeed in delivering this. Because it’s not easy to teach something that must be experienced moment by moment.

And that’s also why others who try to copy my content can’t replicate it. They don’t have the live application, the real-time explanation of why certain things happen. For now, most of what I’ve emphasized has been fair value gaps, because that’s what’s been most prominent. But remember: not every PD Array will form. Just because the framework lists them doesn’t mean they all appear in sequence. New Week Opening Gaps, New Day Opening Gaps, implied fair value gaps—they can appear anywhere. Your job is to observe them when they do.

The whole point of this mentorship is to teach you, first and foremost, how to read price. In my paid mentorships, it was always about watching price. Don’t pressure yourself in a demo account, don’t do this or that, because the outcome becomes emotional. Now, looking through the looking glass at these candlesticks with real money behind them, you feel “I have to be right,” because if you’re wrong, you lose money. You see the difference? It’s hard to argue that isn’t good advice—because it is.

I’m sympathetic to all of you because I know exactly how you feel. You feel alone, and you wonder who you can get support from—friends and family don’t know anything about this and probably don’t believe it’s possible. You want to learn from someone who can clearly outline what makes this work, how you will fail, and what steps you can take to avoid failing. Total avoidance is impossible.

It’s like flight school. They teach you to fly, then at some point, they have you cut the engine mid-air. You might be comfortable, flying smoothly, and suddenly the instructor says, “Turn the engine off. Figure it out.” Of course, there’s anxiety. But they’re teaching you how to perform a controlled landing. This is exactly what happens when you start trading live funds. You’re told to get out there and trade before you’re ready, often by people who can’t prove they’re doing it right themselves. You can’t build your faith on “Here’s a trade I took” snapshots. That approach to selling or teaching is the worst in this industry.

Until you do it, you don’t know. You have to be conditioned, you have to be trained. Over time, it becomes second nature. Some of you will need more time than just this year. That’s acceptable—you have to give yourself permission. If you pressure yourself into a deadline for success, you’re setting yourself up to fail. You don’t know when you’ll reach your weight-loss goal, your bench-press goal, or your trading threshold. Everyone’s learning curve is unique.

The bottom line: you’re going to work your ass off in this industry. Time and effort will exceed what you planned. Learning to trade takes longer and more work than you expect. But I’m giving you a routine this year—day in and day out—showing what to look for, what it looks like, and how it repeats. We’re not afraid of signals drying up or not working anymore. We know there will always be setups.

I needed more tools than just a stochastic and a moving average, because that stuff doesn’t hold up. Markets are more dynamic than one trick. Having a tool doesn’t mean you’ll trade every time—it means you’ll know enough to choose when not to. Most new students think everything is an optimal trade entry. They think every rally sets up a sell and every drop sets up a buy. They email me saying, “I tried an optimal trade entry and got stopped out—how do you know which is the right one?”

Looking through the looking glass for entries only, with no context, is what you’re doing wrong. There’s no narrative on your chart, no higher timeframe consulted. You’re staring at the least important part—the entry. I’ve said this countless times: entry patterns are numerous. There are many ways to get into a move, but only one side of the narrative is going to develop. You won’t change that. The narrative will unfold whether you like it or not.

If you’re not aligned with that narrative, even the best entry technique will fail for you. You must look at the underlying market structure—what makes it most likely to go higher or lower, and where it’s going. Otherwise, you’ll overstay or exit too soon.

What I’m teaching is how to time the market: when to build a bullish model, when to expect a bearish one, when the market is likely to consolidate rather than expand. This removes the guessing. If, by the end of this year, you feel lost, it’s because you didn’t pay attention, you didn’t take notes, and you didn’t backtest. That’s the bottom line—the absolute truth.

I have students who have never made a dime with this. What’s the common denominator? They haven’t done what I told them to do, and they’ve done everything I told them not to. The ones who end up making money are the ones who, maybe at first, ignored my instructions, tried their own way, learned from that failure, and then started following what I said—or they followed my instructions from the very beginning and found their way into profitability. I’m sorry it’s harder than you thought it would be. I was the problem when I first started too.

Trading is the looking glass. What do you see when you look through it? Do you see problems you need to work on, character flaws you need to correct, coping mechanisms you need to build? You’re going to see arrogance without justification, modesty where people should be pounding their chest, people failing miserably and denying it was them—not the material or the concepts. Because around the world, people are using these same concepts to make real, life-changing money.

If you look at what I do and what I teach, and you look past the noise, you’ll see it. If it resonates with you, run with it. If you have the passion to stick with it, you will be profitable. You will make money here. But you must show up every day, learning and discovering why you derail—because you will—and how you react and think about yourself, your trading, and this industry once you experience loss.

One of the best things that can happen is losing an account. Right now, as a student, that probably sounds like the worst thing imaginable. But losing an account teaches you what it feels like to have one moment where you didn’t see it coming, and then boom—your account is gone, or at least so depleted you can’t take another trade. Every trader needs to experience that. It forces you to respect risk.

If you blow an account and don’t respect the risk, you’ll just do the same thing with the next one. What you’re ignoring is that you’re impulsive and gambling. You’re the person driving that behavior, recklessly, because you want an external confirmation. You’re trying to overleverage to get some big win to feel formidable, to prove you can make a lot of money. But that doesn’t make you a good trader—it makes you an impulsive gambler.

Yes, sometimes impulsive gamblers go into casinos and make a lot of money. But they don’t do it every day or every month. Professional gamblers are not impulsive gamblers. They’re calculated money managers. They embrace uncertainty. That’s what we do in trading—we don’t know what the next candle will do. Anything can happen.

Especially some of you this morning, zoomed in with just a handful of candlesticks like the market’s only going to move 10 handles at most. That’s why you’re not holding trades long enough—you have no visibility. You’re too close to the trees to see the forest. Your nose is on one tree, staring at the bark, and you can’t see anything else.

When you’re trading and you get that high from a big win, you naturally want to get it back immediately. As soon as you exit the trade, you’re thinking, “That was great—let me go again,” believing the chart will give you the same 15-handle run. But it’s done. You have to stop.

Someone else listening to me might warm up to the idea and realize it fits them perfectly. It may resolve the very problems they’ve been wrestling with—the rock in their shoe. Once removed, they can walk without a limp. They won’t have that fear of holding a trade or of being stopped out, because they’ll know what they’re looking for and see it repeat over and over again.

It’s one thing to have a model that works when you first start finding profitability. But what tends to happen is you try to demand more from the model than it can provide. That’s why I personally need different setups. I’m not comfortable being a one-trick pony, especially knowing what I know about price and how it delivers. I know there are many ways to enter setups, and I try to showcase that. Unfortunately, that creates an insatiable desire for everyone else to do everything too, equating it as the only way to be successful or to be a “real ICT student.” That’s not true. All you need is one setup.

I’ve stripped it down to five handles. If you’re starting as a five-handle trader, you’ll find opportunities intraday. You can even be bias-neutral—you don’t have to get the bias perfect. For those struggling with bias, this gives you a way to study setups. Five handles may seem insignificant because you hear others dismiss it, but five handles can change your life if you find them consistently. High-frequency algorithms take huge numbers of trades for less than one handle at a time.

If you’re aiming for five handles but don’t have confidence yet, take three handles and exit. Do that for months until you’re comfortable. It may take longer than you expect. Keep a running log—how long does it take to reach five handles? How much drawdown did you experience? Did it ever reach five after you exited? This gives you data and conditions you to stay disciplined.

I’m telling you to have a $10,000 demo account and practice one mini contract in ES. I want you to see the effect of rushing in underfunded and how to correct drawdown. You’re going to make mistakes through ignorance, but I’ll show you how to fix them—and how to conquer the fear of getting in.

This is exactly what I did for myself and what I’m putting my sons through. You’ll be able to overcome performance anxiety: the fear of doing it wrong or not having trades like mine. For someone new, this model is a looking glass—focus on finding five handles, be content with three. By conditioning yourself over and over intraday with one-minute charts, you’ll have several opportunities each day to challenge yourself, like a lab experiment.

This helps you become indifferent to the outcome, which is exactly what you need as a trader. You’ll know what your model says and trust it because it’s more often right than wrong. If it fails, you won’t panic or jump to something else. You’ll see it as a speed bump, not a roadblock. Just like getting turned down on a Saturday night—it’s not the end, it’s just a no this time.

You finally had the courage to go up there, went long on one contract trying to get five handles, and got nothing—stopped out. Sometimes the market is just going to do that. By conditioning yourself to look for something realistic and practical—five handles at the beginning—you build a solid foundation. It’s reasonable, easy in my opinion, but also powerful. Because if you can develop the confidence to see this repeating, you’re going to see a whole lot of setups. You won’t be fearful of missing anything.

How do you get to the point of never fearing missing a move? Because you see them coming at all angles, all the time. There are a lot of them. The point is, you have to find the ones you like. On Thursday, with the GDP number, I literally walked my son through a setup. I said, “Here’s what can happen here. This is what’s likely to happen.” It did exactly what I said, but I still told him, “I want to see the trade that goes up to the fair value gap. That’s my trade. That’s the one I want to do.”

Even though I was calling it live in front of everyone listening, that’s what it’s like to be well-versed in this. You’ll see lots of five-handle runs up and down. And you’ll never be fearful, which means you won’t be impulsive about jumping into a losing trade to get the win right back.

Just because I can see lots of trades and can engage in all of them doesn’t mean I should. My experience has been that when I do that, I lose sight of where I am and when the bigger moves come. It becomes a game: “I did this one, I did that one,” and I forget I was supposed to be waiting for this.

With my trading, I have to be highly selective. I want to be in the moves that have the best potential for the big runaway runs. I know how to find them. But if I miss them—because they happened before I got to the charts or when I was sleeping—that’s a move I can’t participate in. You can’t either.

I don’t wake up, look at the S&P, and say, “Oh, it moved 20 handles overnight, I wish I could have caught it.” No. I can find 20 handles during the day with multiple five-handle runs. Up, down, up, down—there’s my 20 handles. I’m not worried about it. And you won’t be either.

This is where you should be as a trader. You need to know what you’re looking for, what you’ll accept as a trade that incurs risk, and be comfortable with that. If it fails, you won’t lose your mind. You won’t rush to find something that isn’t in the chart. What you’re trying to do is impose your will. You’re looking through the looking glass in a losing position, in drawdown, and trying to manifest your next setup even when it’s not there. Why? Because you don’t know your model. If you knew your model, you’d sit still until it formed.

If it’s someone you see who is impulsive, that’s a wonderful social experiment to study and observe—not to hate on them or make them feel bad. That’s not the point. But if they’re willing to put themselves out there like a fish in an aquarium for everyone to watch, it’s a perfect experiment for you to see what not to do. You’ll watch them feel the anguish and struggle, trying to force an outcome that’s never going to come because they’re reacting to price instead of predicting price.

You have to predict price. You have to. That’s what every winning trader is doing. How can anyone say your job is not to predict price? That’s exactly what we’re doing. That’s like telling a football team their job is not to score touchdowns. What are we here for? We’re here to predict the future. You’re trading futures—it’s in the name.

When people say your job as a trader is not to predict future price movements but to be ready to react, how does that make sense? It doesn’t. Our job is absolutely to predict price. But in the beginning, you don’t know how to do that. So how do you protect yourself? You go in with baby steps, gradually teaching yourself to trust your ability to do it.

You also have to condition yourself—build coping mechanisms for bad character flaws like impatience, impulsiveness, and gambling tendencies. All those things you think you don’t have right now will show up as soon as you start pushing the button. You’re going to discover you’re a train wreck. You thought you had everything together, but you’re going to find out otherwise.

In the beginning, you’re going to have problems. You’re going to discover things about yourself that you don’t like. You’re going to act impulsively because you’re not disciplined. A professional impulse says, “I’m in a market environment that isn’t conducive to high probability; my training tells me to step aside.” It’s not running away in fear or rolling the dice. That’s what most people do—the “demo disease”: push the button, see what happens; push the button, see what happens.

Nobody has ever started this industry, gotten it all right from day one, and never had hardships or internal conflicts as a trader. Nobody. Everyone comes in here tied to the fire. And that means pain, loss, and frustration. That’s part of this. I never sugarcoat it. I want you prepared to identify it when it happens and to do what’s necessary to wrestle and subdue it, because it will undo you if you don’t.

That’s why I don’t tell you to go for 10 handles a day—that’s unrealistic. I tell you to look for one five-handle move. By doing that every day, you’re conditioning your eye to see it.

It’s like when you buy a car. You think nobody has that color, but as soon as you drive it off the lot you see 17 of the same car. They didn’t all buy it that day. What happened is you activated your reticular activating system. Your subconscious was filtering it out before because it didn’t matter. Now it resonates with you.

When I tell you to study old data and annotate what you see, you’re activating that same system. You’re inviting your subconscious to latch onto something meaningful. That’s why I teach fair value gaps—they’re the most visually identifiable thing in price action, apart from relative equal highs and lows.

In short, you can trade with just those two: relative equal highs and lows, and fair value gaps. For example, if there are relative equal highs with a fair value gap in the middle, you know price is likely to run there. Buy the fair value gap, ride it up to the highs—that’s a model right there, free.

But if you don’t go through old data and instead binge-watch my videos without chart work, you’re wasting time. Everyone else will tell you it’s a waste, but they’re the same people who won’t be trading my setups six months later. There’s a lot of bad advice in this industry.

I’m sorry it’s harder than you thought. It wasn’t easy for me either. But I’ve been doing it much longer, and I know what works. If you do what I tell you and avoid what I tell you to avoid, you’ll save yourself a lot of time. Be accepting, be flexible. Give yourself permission to take a year, maybe longer. If you give yourself a broad timeline with no deadline, you’ll do far better.

I’m investing a lot of time in all of you. And it’s your job to do all the work in between. That work is a lot. If it were as simple as knowing where to enter, where to place a stop loss, and nothing else, I could put it in a book and you’d all be profitable. I’ve already done that in videos and yet many of you still aren’t making money. Why? Because that’s not all that’s required. You have to understand the person inside you who’s going to sabotage your success if you don’t address them.

We’re not always prepared for doing difficult things. And trading is one of the most difficult things on this planet. You’re wrestling with yourself in an industry designed to take you out. This industry wasn’t created for everyone to walk in, know what’s going on, and make money. As P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” People come here looking for animal patterns, gimmicks, or “Mickey Mouse” indicators, thinking that moving averages crossing means price will rise—and then they lose their accounts. They get angry, think they just didn’t do it right that time, push harder, and lose again—never realizing the market doesn’t respect any of that.

What happens next is they form strong opinions about how they’ll never submit to someone else’s material, even when that material is exactly what’s happening. They become toxic to themselves and anyone who listens to them. This happens all the time.

But I’m telling you now: I’m going to make masters this year—ridiculously profitable traders. I can’t wait. But I also don’t want you to be the one who blows it up for yourself. You don’t yet know how easily you can do that. That’s why these conversations matter. They’re meant to help you avoid the pitfalls I and many others fell into.

You’re going to fail at things you don’t see coming. Surprises will snap at you from nowhere. You’ll say, “I didn’t realize I’d do something that dumb.” That’s normal. The pitfalls are snares waiting for you, and without preparation you won’t recognize them until it’s too late. That’s why I speak to you like this—to give you warning beforehand.

Men especially fall into the image trap: Olympic-sized feats, big money only, huge P&L, no steady growth, and catastrophic drawdowns. That’s the mindset you must avoid. Swinging for grand slams every day without sniper precision or risk management is a losing game. The market won’t hand you windfall victories day in and day out.

You need to respect risk—identify it, manage it—not just mention it. You need it demonstrated, not just talked about. Most people out there trying to promote “consistent profitability” won’t ever show it live or fail publicly while trying.

You can’t learn this by simply trading live or demo money. You must first learn to read price. Get to the point where you can look at a chart and your eye instantly jumps to what matters—the way your eye jumps to your new car after you buy it. Why? Because you’ve conditioned yourself to look for it.

Your attention to detail is your training. The details are these elements—these PD arrays. It doesn’t matter which one you end up loving. It matters which one resonates with you, which one you can see easily in the chart. For me, fair value gaps are the easiest. For you, it might be breakers. That’s fine. That means you’ll trade breakers. It’s not inferior or superior.

People ask me my favorite setup. My answer: the one I’m in right now—the one giving me the outcome I’m looking for. I have lots of them. I try not to say which is my “favorite” because as soon as I do, people create a celebrity complex around it. I’m not a celebrity. I’m an average guy who knows this material.

If I had to trade only one setup and wait for it, it would be the second-stage distribution in my market maker sell model or the second-stage accumulation in my market maker buy model. That’s taught in the core concepts. Those moves are quick, sudden runs—a low-resistance liquidity run. That would be my “drug of choice” because it sets up every week and gives me the freedom to scalp small pieces or ride the whole move for a month’s income.

But the point is, I have other tools too. That means I can take advantage of whatever the market gives me. If the S&P is choppy, I can still trade five handles. If the dollar is consolidating and you’re a forex trader, your mind should jump to non-dollar crosses because they’ll be active.

It’s important to understand there are many ways to extract profits from the market. You need a macro understanding of what causes disparity between markets, because disparity equals movement. And without movement, we can’t profit.

As an intraday speculator, you must identify where the highest-probability movement is—up or down—and then factor in the time of day. That’s why I tell you which times to watch the market. Look for higher or medium-impact news events, because that’s when the market is most manipulated. Those are the days you want—the days retail traders are invited into a snare.

Smart traders learn how to lose professionally. That’s what consistently profitable trading really is—managing losses. Every profitable trader is a professional loser. They know when to take losses because their winners will run. The ones who don’t survive are the ones trying to be professional winners only. They can’t handle losing, and they end up losing everything—including their ability to trade.

Some of you might think you can blow a few accounts and it’s fine because you have the money. But after a certain number of resets, you’ll realize it’s a waste. You’ll want it so badly but won’t spend any more money on it. Don’t get there. Learn to respect the risk now.

What you’re doing when you jump from trade to trade trying to recover losses or chase that high is like chasing another hit of heroin. You’re an addict—the wrong kind of addict.

Your homework every day is back testing. And my version of back testing isn’t what most people think it is. It’s not just “mock trading” or simulator replay (though that has its place). My back testing is a casual, methodical study of previously traded price data you can’t participate in anymore. You’re not trying to take live trades in the past—you’re observing, logging, and analyzing.

You’re testing the validity of the setups I teach—breakers, fair value gaps, institutional order flow entry drills—whatever pattern speaks to you. Go back over old data:

• How many times does your chosen PD array form?
• On what timeframes?
• Over how many weeks?
• How long does it take price to deliver to the level I teach you to look for?
• How much movement occurs?
• How much drawdown happens?

Write it all down. Doing that builds familiarity and affinity for the pattern because you’ve invested time looking at it. This is how you condition your eye and your subconscious—exactly like training a muscle.

As you do this, you’ll find the setup that clicks for you. Maybe it’s fair value gaps, maybe it’s breakers, maybe it’s optimal trade entries, maybe it’s institutional order flow entry drills. Whatever pattern your personality aligns with, you can take that one thing and make money with it—and never use anything else I’ve taught.

Going through the core content gives you the chance to decide who you want to be as a trader:

• Long-term or swing trader
• Short-term trader
• Daily range trader
• Scalper

That’s your decision. I’ve given you the tools; you decide how to approach the market. When you’ve done the work, it feels like yours. Yes, I taught you the concepts, but your model is the one you created. When you start making real money with that, every day feels like a weekend.

That mentality becomes natural because you built it yourself. You put in the blood, sweat, tears, effort. You worked through your doubts and uncertainties. And once you’ve done it yourself, it’s unbelievably rewarding.

You earned it. Nobody can take it away. Nobody can minimize it. When you have money in the bank that you didn’t have before, will you care what anyone thinks about me or you? No. And that’s the right mindset.

You’re here to learn how to trade, to make money, to find a model, and to build a better life.

You’ve got to do the things I’m telling you to do. There’s no shortcut. You can’t fumble your way through this. It’s going to take work. That means going through charts and studying price action you can’t trade. You’re not even pushing a button—not on demo, not on simulators. You need to go through the process of finding what makes sense to you from the PD arrays I’m teaching. That’s your first step.

I’ve already taught you how to find the draw on liquidity, and you’re being exposed to it all year long. That will happen by default. But the PD array—the multiplier, the entry pattern—that’s on you. You need to decide what it is. Nobody can make that decision for you.

I can’t make you see a mitigation block. I can’t force you to understand a breaker if you don’t grasp liquidity, stop placement, and how traders think about breakouts. You can see me pointing to it on a chart, but it’ll mean nothing if you haven’t studied enough old data to recognize:

• Who was long?
• Who was short?
• Where were their stops?

Reverse-engineer the price movements the way I did. That’s what led to my consistency.

Backtesting is exactly that—looking at old moves and studying them:

• How often does it form?
• How quickly does it move into profit?
• How much drawdown does it incur?

Log the date, the market, the movement, the drawdown, the time to deliver. Get a running total or an average. Throw out the max winner and max loser. The remainder gives you a baseline for a model.

This is how you take measured, calculated risks. That’s how I developed my three-minute rule: if it’s not in my favor within three minutes, I’m scaling out or closing.

All of my lectures are meant to guide your focus and remind you what you’re here for and how long this will take. Listen and do your best to follow—even when it’s uncomfortable or feels counterintuitive.

Your first milestone might just be covering a small bill each month with your trading. Then, as consistency grows, cover half your bills, then all of them. Eventually you’ll be able to replace your job’s income with your trading income—but only after you’ve built up your own capital.

Don’t quit your job after a funded-account windfall. $100,000 is not security. It’s one car, one windfall. You need time, experience, and your own money in the bank—at least $100,000 of your own funds, ideally $200,000—to give yourself the mental cushion of not having to take a trade.

If you quit too soon, you’ll feel the pressure to trade, and that pressure destroys traders. While you’re still working, losses don’t crush your mental capital the same way.

Most of you don’t have six-figure salaries now. Give yourself a two-year cushion. Respect the time this takes. If it takes three years, what’s the alternative? Keep working your day job without ever building this skill.

So put your nose in the books. Every day we’re writing a new chapter. Every week it’s a new volume. Keep showing up, do the work, and you’ll grow stronger over time. That’s when things start to happen.

Right now you think it’s impossible. Everything is impossible until you do it. Everything. Everyone told me I’d never figure this out. I figured out my own way, and you’ll figure yours out too.

But quitting your job too soon is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. It puts an incredible amount of pressure on you. If you don’t yet have the experience of knowing exactly what you’re looking for—knowing it like the back of your hand—and you don’t know you’re going to find valid setups next week, you’re not ready to make trading your only income.

Being honest with yourself about that is not weakness. It’s realism. It’s practicality. It means you’re evaluating your skill set, your present aptitude, and your gaps honestly. You’re not overestimating yourself. You’re not prematurely thinking you’re at a level you’re not at yet. That mindset alone puts you on the right track, because it’s grounded in reality.

This stage is “under construction.” You’re still developing. But stick with this process and by November you’ll be a completely different trader. You’ll be able to look at a chart and know in short order exactly where it’s going. You’ll have multiple ways to approach entries. That’s empowerment—the outcome of this year.

The proof is already in front of you. Every day we meet, the same things repeat. I’m calling shots. I’m calling where the market is going. All you need to do is study, be present, and let your eyes train to see it.

We’re spending the first two months just observing. After that, we move into pressing buttons—live, but small. By April you’ll be in markets, tracking your trades, logging your times, your fills, your results. Everyone will have different fills, everyone will break rules at first, everyone will feel fear. That’s part of the process.

Every tweet I send is like a family text saying, “Hey, here’s my focus right now.” It’s not a signal service. It’s me grabbing your attention, pointing you at what matters. Then you engage.

You take the time you need. If it takes the full year, so be it. If it takes longer, that’s okay too. If you do everything I tell you, it will happen for you. If you quit, you fail.

Right now, you’re learning in the safest possible environment. No trading, no risk, no money lost. You’re learning how candlesticks form, how models behave, what to wait for. That clarity—knowing your model and knowing exactly what you’re waiting for—is what the people who fail never get. And that’s what you’re building now.