Until The Brakes Fall Off | Learn

Date: March 26, 2023

Outline

00:38 - Today’s show.

03:18 - What happens when you show someone something and they want to do it right away.

06:51 - The first phase of the crowdfunding campaign.

14:27 - My son is the exception to the rule.

18:10 - When you get into a drawdown, it’s okay to lose what you made on a trading day.

26:16 - Two perspectives to have in mind -.

28:59 - You’re being careless, reckless, reckless, gambling, gambling, gambling -.

36:35 - What makes a blown account become a blown account.

39:58 - Don’t be afraid because you did this -.

46:18 - He feels like he can do everything, but he’s superhuman.

48:59 - If you are unstable and highly emotional impatiently waiting to get into a trade, the best advice is to go do something else for 30 minutes.

55:10 - A lot of people quit, but still push the button because they can't take themselves away from it.

58:47 - My son has a chip on his shoulder.

01:05:39 - Everyone does that on their first losing trade.

01:08:22 - You have to be able to own it.

01:14:50 - If you’re going to allow this to frame a toxic mindset going forward, you’re going to be fearful.

01:19:37 - What happens when you’re hypersensitive to the negative.

01:26:49 - When you’re young and you’re in a market like this, the same type of reckless abandonment materializes.

01:29:47 - Stress is like racing fuel in a car -.

01:35:25 - The only person that’s going to get hurt is you -.

01:37:37 - Don’t be afraid of it, trading is like patchwork.

01:44:54 - What causes people to become ugly.

01:48:26 - Give yourself permission to mitigate your drawdown over a period of time.

01:54:27 - You have to prop yourself up, encourage yourself, and be constantly reminding yourself that there’s no emergency.

01:57:53 - Don’t become reckless and gambling.

02:03:22 - What is a fair value gap? -.

02:07:19 - We don’t use luck, we use process.

02:14:39 - Don’t let weeds grow in your garden that make you feel like shit.

02:17:57 - The real mechanics behind what makes these markets move -.

02:24:56 - What happens if you lose control of your tongue in a live setting.

02:29:08 - You have to be careful how you place expectations on yourself when you’re trying to recuperate from a drawdown.

02:36:11 - We’re not surprised when shit happens.

02:39:24 - I don’t give a fuck if you have an attitude about it.

02:46:41 - When you lose control and focus, you create scar tissue.

02:49:59 - When you’re in drawdown, it’s always self inflicted -.

02:57:37 - When you’ve lost the plot of the trade.

03:01:51 - Why you’re pantomiming -.

03:09:56 - Don’t take profits -.

03:13:43 - Don’t listen to the dumb logic that you’ll have stunted growth.

03:21:02 - You’ll know when the shit is not favorable for you to be trading.

03:23:35 - There is no 100% strike rate ever -.

In the morning session, it was more or less a seek-and-destroy environment—higher highs, lower lows, back and forth. Finally, during the lunch hour, price kept pressing higher into the new week opening gap, and it ultimately closed at the high of that gap.

When I was younger, whenever I did anything even slightly well—not that I was trading great, because I was still new—the times I would get into a trade, see it go into profit, and then fail to hold it because I was nervous or second-guessing myself, I’d close it early. Then it would continue in my favor, and if I had just held it, it would have hit my target, which would have been much more satisfying.

But it didn’t happen that way, and that’s typical for someone who’s new. If you’ve experienced this, or if you’ve never been consistently profitable, whenever you get a win—whether small or sizable—it doesn’t really feel good. It’s new to you; you don’t know where price is going, so you feel like you have to close the trade prematurely because you’re afraid it will turn into a loss. You truly don’t know where it’s likely to go, which is why I teach you to learn how to identify the draw on liquidity—where price is most likely to reach. If you don’t have that, you’ll be at the mercy of your emotions and you’ll psych yourself out.

Everybody comes into trading with a weak mindset. You’re impatient. You want to rush into making money, you want to rush into doing something “right,” because you want to feel smart and you want to feel good about yourself.

Most developing traders end up going completely on tilt, turning into gamblers. They don’t see that they did it to themselves; they don’t recognize that it wasn’t a system failure, it was recklessness. And you need to understand that it was recklessness — you can’t do things like that and expect good outcomes.

There will be times when you just do it — you’ll feel confident, even overconfident. You’ll take a losing trade, or you’ll have a win that felt great and want to jump right back in because you think it’s going to move even more. Then you try to re-enter, and this time price doesn’t do what you want. Now you’re in “fix it” mode, trying to put out fires you started yourself. But you don’t realize you’re not pouring water on the fire, you’re pouring gasoline on it. That wildfire spreads and burns not only the gains you were already dissatisfied with, but also the equity you worked so hard to build.

You slip into drawdown. At first, losing just what you made that day is tolerable — it’s annoying, but manageable. But when you start eating into what you built over a week or a month, that really hurts. That’s like a kick to the groin. It sucks, especially if you head into the weekend like that. It poisons everything: food doesn’t taste as good, your friends’ company irritates you, and every little thing feels like thorns. There’s no comfort, no rest, and you just keep punishing yourself.

You’re trying to get it back quickly, quickly, quickly, and you just keep doing more damage. I actually think it’s a good thing that funded-account firms have that loss threshold where they stop you. It’s like, “You can’t do any more. That’s it, you’ve done enough.” It forces you to step back and reevaluate what you’re doing.

This is all you’re trying to do—nothing else. You’re not trying to get rich, you’re not trying to blow the account up, you’re not trying to pass the combine in a week, or even in five days. We’ve set the pace at two weeks, so there’s no rush to hit the target. Just aim for low-hanging fruit each day while you’re learning.

You have to feel that pain. There has to be a consequence—a real one. Something formidable that shakes you up and makes you feel like you never want to risk doing that again. Because this is what you feel, this is what it’s like: all that work you did the first time, when it felt effortless, fun, and enjoyable… now you’re in drawdown.

Now you have to fight your way back to that starting point. And from this point on, every trade you take will feel heavier, because you’re in drawdown. That creates toxic thinking. You start drifting away from your rules. You abandon what you’re supposed to be doing, and that’s why people fail themselves and blow their accounts. You’ve suddenly become hypersensitive to every transaction until you return to your equity high—as if that number is magic, as if you must get that exact balance back or you’ll always be afraid. And in your mind—this happens to everyone, I don’t care how long you’ve been trading or how much you make—when you’re in drawdown below an equity high, it feels like you’re staring up at a mountain, even if the actual amount isn’t that big.

This is what it was like in my head: I’m going to push this bitch until the brakes come off. Nothing’s stopping me.

No one could have told me, “Stop what you’re doing, you’re being careless, reckless, you’re gambling. You’re trying to do something that’s impossible to do right now. Your clarity is gone—you don’t have it. You’re literally just pushing the button, hoping something happens, with no real reason to be in the trade. You just want to do something and feel like you have to do something.”

Why do you feel like that?

Because you’ve got adrenaline pouring through your body and you’ve scared the shit out of yourself, plus cortisol. Those two chemicals are telling you the same thing your brain is telling you: you’ve turned this into an emergency. You’re lying to yourself by acting like you should be panicking.

It should be the opposite. As soon as you start feeling emotional, like you have to take the trade, have to get in there, that’s your clear signal to turn the charts off, leave your house, go for a drive—with your phone nowhere near your hand—and stay away for at least 30 minutes.

You need to let those chemical imbalances burn off, because you’re literally under the influence of high-stress hormones that exist to make you either fight or run. It’s fight-or-flight. And you’re sitting there in front of the charts telling yourself there’s an emergency you created, that there’s a fire you have to put out.

But you do know how to put it out. It’s really simple:

Close all positions.
Remove all pending orders.
Turn the charts off.
Walk away.

That’s it. It’s handled. No more “emergency.”

Yes, you’ve got a paper cut. Yes, your pride is hurt. Yes, you damaged the account—but you still have an account.

If you blow the account, yeah, you burned the house down. It sucks. But even that is still not a real emergency. You can refund, reset, add more money later.

The real problem is what happens in your head when you draw down from an equity high—especially when you’re new—and then you fall from that height.

This is what it was like in my head: I’m going to push this bitch until the brakes come off. Nothing’s stopping me.

Why do you feel like that?

But you do know how to put it out. It’s really simple:

Close all positions.
Remove all pending orders.
Turn the charts off.
Walk away.

That’s it. It’s handled. No more “emergency.”

Yes, you’ve got a paper cut. Yes, your pride is hurt. Yes, you damaged the account—but you still have an account.

If you blow the account, yeah, you burned the house down. It sucks. But even that is still not a real emergency. You can refund, reset, add more money later.

The real problem is what happens in your head when you draw down from an equity high—especially when you’re new—and then you fall from that height.

When you have an equity high and you slip away from it into drawdown, it literally feels like you’re standing at the base of a mountain, craning your neck to look up at the peak. You tell yourself, “I’ve got to get all the way back up there.”

But before, when you were building that equity high, you didn’t see it like that. You were just taking one trade at a time. It was one step at a time, like a rock climber: “Where’s my next foothold? Where’s my next grip?” That’s all you cared about. You were doing the right thing — following your model.

Now, in drawdown, you’re staring up at that same mountain, that peak you slid down from, thinking, “How am I going to get back up there?”

Well, how did you get there the first time?

Incremental, modular steps. Basic, boring execution. Following your rules. Doing this and expecting that. One piece at a time.

Before the drawdown, you weren’t trying to do crazy stuff. You were just focused on:

Find the next setup.
Take the trade.
Take the profit.
Be done.
Turn the charts off.
Wait for the next session or the next trading day.

It was business.

Now, because you’re in drawdown, your entire perspective about yourself, your ability, and the path back to that equity high is distorted. That’s how a normal drawdown becomes a blown account — not understanding how fragile that mentality has become.

You’re hypersensitive to every fluctuation. Every tick against you feels threatening. You don’t want to sit through another stop getting hit. You become more likely to avoid using a stop altogether, like you did on Friday morning.

Once you remove the stop and price trades past where your stop should have been, you start bargaining with yourself:

“If I close now, it’ll probably just reverse from here.”
“Let me just give it a little more room.”

You start giving yourself that soft, deceitful “pillow talk,” like you’re trying to keep a one-night stand from leaving. You know you shouldn’t still be in that trade, but you stay, telling yourself comforting lies while price runs the sword deeper into you.

More damage is done. Eventually, you can’t take the pain and you exit — and then price moves in your original direction. Not because your idea was valid, but simply because the market moved on. Your mind frames it as, “See? I did it wrong again,” and now you’re tempted to chase it.

That’s exactly what goes on in a trader’s head during drawdown.

The only good thing sometimes is when this happens on a Friday — you’re forced into 48 hours of decompression. You have to step away. Reset.

You must remind yourself with positive self-talk that nothing fundamental has changed:

These markets still move the same way.
They still reach for liquidity.
They still move from premium to discount and discount to premium.
They still seek inefficiencies and rebalance them.
Time is still in control of when things unfold.

You just did something incorrect in this moment. You’re new. You don’t have years of journal entries and experience to anchor you yet.

That’s why it’s essential to spend time in demo and to journal — so that later, when you hit rough patches and feel like “the algorithm changed,” you can look back at your own evidence:

“No, it didn’t change. I’ve seen this work. I’ve seen myself execute this well.”

Those past notes cheer you on when current emotions try to sabotage you.

Listen, don’t be afraid. You did this, yes—but you can still move forward. Don’t let it weigh you down or make you feel like you’re never going to be able to do this, because you’re going to spend all weekend telling yourself you made a mistake and wishing you could go back in time and never have done it. That’s every trader’s regret when they lose money. We all want to go back in time and not push the button on that trade, or not start trading on a day when we knew there really wasn’t anything there to be trading—but we thought, “I’ve got time, let me just push the button, maybe I’ll get lucky and catch a winner.” All of that only becomes obvious afterward, when hindsight is perfectly 20/20 and you can go back and pinpoint exactly what you did wrong.

You want to find some kind of external reason why you fucked up, because it’s uncomfortable to accept that it was you. And that’s what this industry does to you: it’s a perfect mirror, better than the one in your bathroom when you’re brushing your teeth and getting ready in the morning.

That mirror just shows you a reflection. This industry shows you who you really are.

You can lie to the bathroom mirror. You can comb your hair, put on makeup, shave, change your eye color with contacts—do whatever you want to change the appearance. But in this business, you can’t wear a mask. All the masks fall off the moment you push the button. The real you is exposed. The real person inside you—the one making the decisions, the one driving drunk behind the buys and sells—that’s who’s responsible.

And sometimes that’s extremely hard to deal with. It’s stressful. It’s alarming when you suddenly realize, “Wow, I don’t have it all together. I thought I had it figured out. I had all these plans, all this success mapped out.” Then you put on a trade, wreck yourself, and instead of stopping, you try to fix it—without knowing what you’re doing—and become impulsive.

Instead of saying, “Okay, I caused this. Let me step back and slow down,” you speed up. You do more of the same stupid stuff and make it worse.

Why do you do that? Cortisol, adrenaline, and not knowing what you’re doing.

In your mind, it’s the equivalent of standing in your house while every wall is on fire and the room you’re in is filling with smoke. It feels like a real emergency. To someone just walking past your desk, it doesn’t look that way. You might just look serious, maybe not smiling—but they don’t see an emergency. Inside, though, it feels like the whole world is coming to an end, and you’re desperately trying to put out all the fires at once.

That’s what he experienced. That’s what I experienced every time I blew an account. And that’s what you experience when you blow yours. Ask around—everyone who’s been in this game has gone through this, not once, but many times.

Until you reach the point where you truly know your model and you’ve mastered yourself, this cycle will keep repeating.

I just wanted to get it back right away. Why? Why did you feel like you had to get it back right away? Because I felt like I had to get it back.

Nothing has to happen. You have to be comfortable between trades. You cannot have any kind of overwhelming impulse to jump in just to make something back or make something more. If you’re doing that, that’s the wrong starting point — you’re gambling.

I promise you, if you’re listening to me right now and you’re unstable, highly emotional, and impatiently waiting to get into a trade, the best advice I can give you is: go do something else for 30 minutes. Come back. If you missed the move, who cares? That’s not the last trade that’s going to form.

But if you lose your shit over having missed that move, you are a gambler. You’re absolutely an uncontrolled gambler. You feel like you’ve got to be in every move. I’m not teaching you to do that.

I want to pick my shots. I want to be able to take trades that make sense to me, on the moves I know are likely to occur. I’m not in a rush to get in, and when everything lines up and I have all the signatures I’m looking for, then I pull the trigger.

They’re the ones who tweet at you.

You need to master yourself. Just because you have the sword in your hand and can swing it around doesn’t mean you should be swinging it around. You should keep it in its scabbard, unsheathe it, make one precise stroke, clean the blade, and put it back. It’s the art of drawing the sword: the draw and the cut are one motion. You’re not out there like Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, wildly hacking with a machete at everything that moves.

When you’re in drawdown, that’s exactly what you become: a crazed homicidal psychopath with a machete, and every candlestick looks like a tree you have to chop down. “This is the one I’m going to cut next. Oh, you printed that candle? You’re getting it.” The whole time, you’re not cutting down the market; you’re cutting yourself to pieces. You’re not cutting anything but your equity base, and you don’t even realize it, because you’re in that crazed state you created — and you’re acting like someone or something else did this to you.

You’ve lost the plot. You’ve lost control of yourself. And the only real fix is time.

You have to separate yourself from the charts. Step away from the stimulus that’s driving you to act like that. Ground yourself. Let the adrenaline and cortisol burn off. Adrenaline only lasts a few minutes, but cortisol hangs around longer; give it at least a solid 30 minutes.

Once you’re back in a proper state of mind, then you can deal with other parts of your life without being edgy, snappy, or ready to fight. You won’t feel like every word spoken to you has needles in it. You won’t argue with your spouse, you won’t yell at your kids, you won’t kick the dog, you won’t get fired at your job.

But when you’re staring at that drawdown like it’s a mountain you’ll never climb again, telling yourself you have to hurry back to the top as fast as possible — stop and listen for a second:

Nothing has actually changed.

The market is the same. The concepts, the system, the methodology, the way price prints — none of that has changed. The only thing that has changed is your perception of yourself, your ability, and what you think you “must” do next.

You feel like your house burned down and you need it rebuilt right now. But real life doesn’t work like that. You do lose things you can’t get back: that effortless feeling of, “I’m doing everything right, this is easier than I thought,” that you had while you were making the equity high.

Now you’ve taken a loss. Now you’re in drawdown. Now you do have to second-guess yourself:

“Am I going to do this to myself again?”
“What am I going to do if this trade turns against me?”
“How am I going to feel if I take another loss?”

That lives in your head now — even when you’re not in a trade — and it creates performance anxiety. It’s very easy at that point to talk yourself out of ever really committing to this, even while you’re still pushing the button like a compulsive gambler.

A lot of people quit mentally but keep trading. They won’t wrestle themselves into discipline. They’re done inside, but they still need to push the button.

Much like on my first-year honeymoon, I told you I took $100 — that’s all I chose to bring — and fed it into multi-column slot machines. I could have brought more, but I knew the odds of actually making money were next to none. So I capped myself at $100.

After hours of playing, I was just trying to lose the remaining balance. I was down, I wanted it over with, but I didn’t want to walk away. Stupid, right? I just wanted to lose it and be done.

That’s exactly what happens when you trade in the same state of mind my son is in right now. You want to be able to say you were forced out by something external:

“Stupid brokers.”

“Stupid market makers.”

“They got my stop again.”

Because then it’s easier to live with. If someone else did it to you, you didn’t really mess up.

But the truth is: you did everything wrong.

You did everything wrong, and you took zero responsibility.

In this industry, responsibility is always yours. It’s not mine as the mentor, it’s not your broker’s, it’s not the funded-account firm’s, it’s not your spouse’s, and it’s not your friends’. It is yours.

Some people who come into my fold never develop the level of responsibility required to be a trader. And when they first bump into that reality—through losses they themselves caused—their reaction is:

“This stuff doesn’t work.”

“It’s a fraud.”

“It’s a scam.”

All of that despite how many times I’ve shown what price is going to do beforehand. You’ve seen me execute trades. You’ve seen me use a live account on my YouTube channel. You watched me log in every day. You saw losing trades, you saw drawdown, you saw me correct the drawdown and double the account in five weeks with one contract.

But then you hear:

“Well, you didn’t show 30 years of that. Get out of here.”

I don’t need to. I show you every day what the market is going to do.

Everyone with a weak mind eventually exposes it in this industry. You can see who they are: they’re the ones who talk the most trash.

“This doesn’t work.”

“These concepts aren’t profitable.”

These people are broke and stuck in the same mental state my son is feeling right now — and they never got out of it.

They’re the kid who never got picked for the team, always chosen last… and they’ve carried that chip on their shoulder ever since.

Yes, it sucks. But you’ve got to fucking suck it up, buttercup. Because this is exactly what it’s like for the rest of your career. Drawdown is never fun. It’s not fun to lose money, it’s not fun to have a losing trade. It sucks. But you say: “Okay, I got that one wrong. What am I going to do next?” Done. Handled. I have a process.

You didn’t have a process when you went into drawdown. And when you eventually blew your account, you still had no process. You were in that burning house, trying to put out a house fire because you didn’t want all of your loved ones’ things and your things—the stuff you treasure—to go up in smoke. You’re thinking you can’t replace it.

That’s exactly how you look at that equity high. You treat it like some family heirloom that can never be replaced. Get the fuck out of here. That “equity high” is something you’re supposed to go past.

All a drawdown is, is a slingshot.

You go up to an equity high, you pull back to load more energy, and then you let it go: boom—new equity high. Eventually you draw down again, okay, no problem: pull back like a slingshot, and boom—new equity high. That’s how this works.

But the first time you encounter it, you’ve been driving fine, doing everything more or less correctly, and then you did something stupid. You pushed too far, took a losing trade.

Okay. Stop.

Don’t go back in. Wait for the next trading day. Give yourself some time.

Out loud, with your own mouth, you tell yourself:

“There is no emergency.”
“This losing trade is not an emergency.”
“I don’t have to fix this right now.”

This is not a five-alarm fire. It’s a flat tire.

It’s not a “carbecue” with your whole car engulfed in flames on the side of the road. You just got a flat. Change the fucking tire and get back on the road. You can’t do that if you melt the whole car down in a blaze of overtrading. Then you need a new car—new account, new funding, resets—expensive and unnecessary.

So to avoid that, let it be a flat tire. One losing trade. That’s it.

Now you’re angry, you’re pissed off.

Are you in the right state of mind to take another trade? No.

So this has to be part of your process:

As soon as you take a loss → stop.
Get up, walk away.
30 minutes minimum.

I don’t care what you think you’re seeing on the charts. I don’t care what I’m posting on Twitter, or whether I’m saying “big day, big draw, big move.”

Stop.

Turn me off. Close social media. Turn your charts off. Leave for 30 minutes. Minimum.

If you come back and you still feel like you “have to” be in something, you’re in a gambler’s mindset. You are not fit to trade at that moment. Don’t touch anything.

The only way you even notice this clearly is by putting time between the loss and the next entry. Otherwise, I promise you: your next entry will be impulsive, reckless, stupid shit.

Everybody does that on their first drawdown. Everybody.

And the crazy part? If everyone recorded what went on in their head the first time they blew an account, it would sound like they were all reading from the same script. Same panic, same urgency, same “I’ve gotta get it back right now.”

You don’t have to get it back right now.

You don’t have to “fix it” today.

You have to protect yourself from yourself.

Like you need to fear yourself, not the market. Because that’s what it’s like when this industry puts you through something like this: it exposes you. It doesn’t change your method, the teacher who taught you, or the concepts themselves. None of that is any different than it was before you did something improper. It shines a spotlight right on you—you, the operator, the one who pushed the button, the one who opened yourself up to risk. You were the one driving the car. You were the one who got drunk. You were the one who caused all that carnage. And you have to own it.

Some people who come into this industry aren’t equipped to own it. They want to blame everything and everyone else for their stupidity, their impulsiveness, their lack of self-control. But you have to own it. You have to be strong and, as soon as you start feeling that way, identify it for what it is.

It’s not weakness to stop trading. It’s not weakness to go home in drawdown. That is not weakness—that’s exactly the right way to do it. You have to be able to take losses and go home with them. It’s okay. The market is going to be there. Opportunities will present themselves again. And that equity high is not a family heirloom you’ve lost in a fire. It’s not an insurmountable peak on a mountain that you’re never going to be able to get back to.

That equity high you fell from—you’re going to reach it again. But you don’t have to get back there right away. It’s just like your favorite vacation destination: you’ve been there once, you know you’ll go again, but it doesn’t have to be now.

As a 20-year-old, I did the same kind of stupid thing. I was trading copper one time and literally fell one point short of my target—the exact price I’d been aiming for. There was still time left in the day, so I thought, “Alright, let me just go in real quick and do one more trade to get that last point.” That single contract, taken just to force price to my number, was a losing trade.

So what happened next? The same thing that happened with my son on Friday morning.

“Fuck, I’ve gotta get that back now. I don’t even care if I still hit my original target today—I have to get that loss back. I can’t accept this.”

So I took another trade. That one was also a loser. Now I was in the completely wrong state of mind—though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know enough about myself yet. I didn’t understand that this is exactly what happens in the minds of traders who are hopped up on risk and gambling. I wasn’t thinking, What if I’m wrong again? I was only thinking, I’ll get it back if I just keep going.

That’s the wrong mentality. When you’re distorted and wound up, you’re no longer looking for a valid trade. You’re trying to impose your will on the market. You just want what you want.

What had I really done? I grabbed a club like a caveman, walked out of my cave, and went hunting for something—anything—to knock over the head and drag back home so I could say, “It’s mine.”

That’s what I did. I didn’t just need three profitable trades to recover the losses I created chasing that last point—I ended up switching to cotton and blew the entire account that day. All because I was one point away from my target and was absolutely convinced the market had to fill it and let me be right.

It wasn’t about whether there was a real trade there. It was about trying to force my will onto the market.

You have to slow yourself down and hit the brakes. Put some time between the last thing you did that caused you pain—drawdown, an adverse result you didn’t want but are now stuck with. How are you going to deal with it? Are you going to let it shape a toxic mindset going forward? If you do, you’ll be fearful now, and you’ll be even more afraid to take trade entries.

“I want to get in there and start making money. I’ve got to learn how to trade with real money. If you want to learn how to trade, you’ve got to start with a real account, because demos don’t do it.”

That’s bullshit.

Invariably, there’s going to be at least one of you who finds consistency, profitability, and manages to do it without blowing your account. But the odds are it will be a very, very small number, simply because of how the human body, human mind, emotions, and psychology work.

Most of you will have the same experience my son had. You’ll feel this rush of impulsiveness, where you think there’s an emergency. You created a drawdown, and in your head that becomes a crisis. In the real world, it isn’t. Yes, you did something wrong. Yes, you don’t have the same equity balance you had before. So what?

When you put a trade on, what happens? At that moment, you already don’t have your previous equity high. Commissions are coming out. You’re under the spread. You have to overcome that. Technically you’ve already fallen off your equity high, even if only slightly. You need to keep that in perspective.

Inside any trade, price can move against you before either your stop is hit or you close it. That’s intra-trade drawdown. Guess what? You’re in drawdown there too. Are you losing your mind over that? Some of you will. Six ticks against you, and you’ll be acting like it’s the end of the world: “Oh my goodness, it just moved six ticks, what am I going to do?” Ticks, not handles.

You become hypersensitive to every fluctuation, and it’s hard to wrestle through that. And here’s the part you need to really hear:

As a mentor, I cannot fix what you do to yourself once you’ve put yourself in that state of mind.

I can’t fix the emotional and psychological damage from how you’ve been thinking and talking to yourself. I’m not in your head. I don’t know what you’re saying to yourself. I don’t know what story you’re telling yourself about who or what “really” caused your drawdown.

But I can promise you this: it’s not what you think in that moment. It’s not me. It’s not the concepts. It’s not the market. It’s not the dealer. It’s not the broker.

It’s you. It’s always going to be you.

You think you can just do whatever you want and that there are no consequences. There’s no sense of death, no awareness of mortality—yours or anyone else’s. And when you’re young and in a market like this, that same reckless abandon shows up in your trading.

Then you get hit with drawdown, and it cracks that spear of invincibility, that force field you thought you had all this time. You’re young, you think you’ll live forever, and even if you break a bone, who gives a shit—it’ll heal. But now something has slipped past that shield and actually touched you.

Drawdown shows you how you’re going to react—not just in that moment, but every time you face drawdown in the future. If you don’t handle it properly, if you don’t learn how to navigate it and talk yourself through it, reminding yourself that there is no emergency, you will always be stressed as a trader, even when you’re profitable.

And it sounds impossible, right? How can you be completely stressed out and still profitable? High-stakes trading.

To me, high-stakes trading is high-stress trading. It may feel euphoric when you win and you feel like you just pulled off an Olympic feat—and technically you have. I’m not trying to take away from that, because when it works, it is impressive.

But the problem is what you put your body through in that process. You’re placing yourself under so much stress. When you constantly pump cortisol into your system, it has a real effect on your vascular system. The valves in your arteries and veins, all of that, are getting beaten up. They’re not meant to be hammered like that—just like racing fuel in a car: sure, it’s “go, go, go, baby,” but it tears the engine up.

You can’t do this to yourself long term and expect no consequences. I tore up my stomach with acid from stress as a young man to the point where I couldn’t even drink water without pain. I stressed myself out so badly with this shit that I created an eating disorder. I went from 195 pounds—put together, feeling like “Mr. Wonderful” in my own eyes—down to 150.

This industry did that, because of stress. I couldn’t eat, and to be built you have to feed the body. I couldn’t tolerate solid food, so I ended up on Ensure, literally on a liquid diet for a year and a half. That made me weak, more susceptible to getting sick. The fear of eating because of the pain turned into an eating disorder that I carried for years.

Where did it come from? Trading.

Where in trading did it really start? Doing the stupid shit I tell you to avoid—only nobody told me, because I didn’t have anyone talking to me the way I’m talking to you.

Some of you listening to this are saying, “This guy talks too much bullshit, he rambles, get to the point.”

Here’s the point: you’re not fucking ready.

And for the ones who say, “I don’t like his long rants,” here’s my answer: fuck you. Fail. Fuck you and fail.

Because you are going to fall on your ass. You’re going to go through these things with no tools, no coping mechanisms, no internal framework, and no references to draw from. You’ll go through the same shit I did—and everyone else does—without any preparation, and you’re going to fucking fail.

Then you’ll still be at your shitty job, making menial money, stressed out, wishing it could have worked out for you—but it never did.

Everybody’s going to have drawdown. Everybody is going to push and push and push until the brakes fall off. And when the brakes come off and you blow your account, or you get hard-stopped, that’s when all of this becomes very real.

This shit is money. And money has a lot of influence. It has a lot of control. It has a lot of power over your mind. That’s all it has—power over your mind.

That’s why people try to keep up with the Joneses. That’s why people get on the internet and claim they’re super-rich multimillionaires and everyone else is broke. They do that because they are broke. They’re not really wealthy—if they were, they wouldn’t talk about it.

You’ve got people renting cars, flying out on vacations, staying in certain places, wearing watches that aren’t even real. They’ll go to a Rolex store, sit next to the display, then go buy a knockoff and slap that on social media:

“Yeah, man, I got this Rolex. Patek Philippe. That’s a watch—Rolex is trash.”

But the point is this: money has influence. It can have a negative influence or a positive influence.

All I’m trying to be is a voice of reason and say: money is a tool. That’s all it is—a tool. But you’re trying to handle it like a weapon, and the only person that’s going to get hurt is you.

When you look at those equity highs you drew down from and feel bad about how you got there, it does not matter how you got there or what circumstances led you there. You arrived. You’re here now.

What are you going to do with it?

Are you going to announce it to the world and let other people critique it, laugh at you, troll you, and compound what you’re already feeling? People who secretly suck, can’t do shit, can’t trade, can’t prove anything—nobodies at work but masquerading online like they’re someone special—loud, highly opinionated, but they can’t execute.

Those people will make you feel even worse about yourself.

That’s why I say: don’t invite other people into your trading. Don’t allow anybody else’s input. The only input that matters is your journal. That’s it.

And if you take that drawdown and treat it as an opportunity to improve yourself—how you see yourself, how you see the market—and you remind yourself:

“This was all self-inflicted.”

I’ll say it again: this was all self-inflicted.

Nobody pushed that button but you. You did that. You did it.

Congratulations—it was fucking stunning how you pulled it off. You wrecked yourself all by yourself. Well done.

Now fix it.

Don’t be afraid of it. Because that is trading: you constantly dealing with patchwork, fixing flat tires, touching up the scratches when you ding the car.

You have to own it—that drawdown is yours. You created it, and now you have to fix it.

You must treat your drawdown the same way: you have to care about it. You have to care about that account. You need to nurture it and treat it like a garden. You water it, fertilize it, give it everything it needs to grow, and you keep the weeds out.

What are the weeds? Toxic people with their fucking opinions about you and your trading—and your own toxic thinking. That’s the weeds. You’ve got to keep that shit out of your garden.

Don’t let those choking thoughts about what you did poison your next series of trades or your very next execution.

Most people in trading are not equipped to handle drawdown. It’s not because it’s impossible – it’s because of the toxicity they bring into it. You have to recognize the patterns that repeat in your own psyche: how you think, how you operate, what actually makes you push that button.

These are the things you must journal. Physically write them out.

What was the catalyst that gave you the “confidence” – or the impulsiveness – to take that trade?

You need to be brutally honest when you put that in your journal. Don’t just log the technicals on the chart – that’s not what I’m talking about. Write down why you wanted that trade to make you money.

Were you afraid of missing the move?
Were you chasing a specific dollar amount because you wanted to buy something or pay something off?

Include all of that in your journal.

Much like when I was trading copper as a young man: I fell short of my target by one point. I had to hit that number. So every trade I took after that first trade closed just shy of target was me chasing something completely insignificant. Boom – wrecked. A couple of trades in copper didn’t work. Then I hopped to another market – cotton. Boom again – smoked the whole account. All because I was obsessed with making back that tiny miss.

Long story long, the short of it is this: you have a responsibility to stay in a constant state of control over yourself.

If you’re young and you’re out here smoking weed while trying to trade, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be 100% lucid. You want to do that shit on the weekend? I’m not hating on you. But you don’t do it while you trade. Same with drinking – your state of mind changes. You’re medicating yourself. You cannot do that and expect to manage risk properly.

You have to be comfortable in your own skin sober at the screen, and unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t. When you trade, all your bad shit bubbles up to the surface. Then you lie to yourself and everyone else about it and say it was everything outside of you that caused the damage.

“Oh, this happened because of that.”

No.

You did it.

You own it.

That’s what makes this industry ugly. And that’s what turns people ugly: they can’t handle seeing those parts of themselves, so they project outward. They troll, they talk shit about others, they poison timelines – and they still can’t trade.

That’s what happens to people who can’t accept responsibility for their trading, their losing trades, or their drawdowns. If they can’t walk away from the business, they become trolls. That’s the pipeline.

Meanwhile, you and I – if we take a series of losing trades or go into drawdown – we’re not flipping the table and crying “trading doesn’t work.” We’re not announcing we’re quitting. We’re annoyed, sure, but it’s a paper cut. A shallow scratch. Nothing more.

A losing trade or a drawdown, as long as you still have your account, is a minor setback and an opportunity to do the work required to fix it. There is no deadline. There is no timer. There is no rule that you must recover that drawdown quickly.

You don’t rush it. You respect it, learn from it, and then you fix it—properly.

You know you are capable of ruining yourself, and you have to be responsible. Slow down. Less is more. There’s no time limit. You don’t have to get it back right away. Give yourself time. Schedule it. Schedule it.

If you have drawdown – say you’ve gone into drawdown – give yourself four weeks to fix it. Do you need four weeks? No, you don’t. But in your journal you tell yourself:

“I have given myself permission to take up to four weeks to mitigate this drawdown.”

Guess what that does? It frees you from that overwhelming urge to fix everything immediately. You wrote it out in your own words. You didn’t read it in a book, it isn’t a tweet I sent out – you wrote it. You’ve given your subconscious permission to wait for a deferred event: mitigating that loss over a span of four weeks.

You’ve pushed it out in time so it doesn’t hang over you like a dark cloud, forcing you into trades that might not even really be there.

Now, $4,000—strip this back into a modular perspective. What do you have to do to get that? Four weeks, $4,000: that’s $1,000 a week. That’s 20 handles on one contract per week. Well, shit, that’s only four handles one time per day. Easy, isn’t it?

What’s hard is waiting for the move that sets up that four-handle run and then stopping, because you’ve given yourself four weeks to mitigate that drawdown.

“But ICT, shit man, I’m in a competition to be on the FTO leaderboard. If I fuck around with this stupid shit, I’ll never get back up there.”

You’re trading to be on a leaderboard instead of becoming consistently profitable. You’re fucking gambling. You’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. You’re doing it for pomp, for clout—and you’re wrecking yourself.

When you’re in drawdown, you have to be very careful with how you manage yourself psychologically and emotionally. You have to be your own cheerleader—nobody else is going to do it. And you do that through your journal.

You have to keep yourself accountable. The only one who’s going to do that is you. How? By journaling and writing out exactly what you’re doing.

What is your drawdown?
How much money are you down?
From which equity high did you fall?

You’re looking up at that peak, that mountain, that Mount Everest of your drawdown. Fine. Note the number. Now the question is: How do you get back up there?

You give yourself time. A generous amount of time—much more than is technically required—because that frees you up psychologically.

Think about school: when you knew a final exam was coming, the students who took education seriously and didn’t want to be stressed out weren’t cramming the night before. They were studying a little bit each night—30 minutes here, 30 minutes there—throughout the semester.

Those diligent students, the ones whose parents taught them how to study properly, didn’t wait until the last day to panic. Everyone else was smashed on caffeine the night before, trying to cram months of material into a few hours—stressed out of their minds and retaining almost nothing.

Don’t bring that same mentality into recovering your drawdown. Don’t try to push it all right now.

“It’s gotta happen right now.”
“I need it back by next week.”
“I have to get back to the equity high.”

No. You don’t. There is no deadline.

But in your head, because of social media and constant comparison, it feels like there is. Everybody’s only showing their highlights—the best trades, the leaderboard screenshots—not the full story. Not the drawdowns. Not the losing streaks. Not the days they stopped live-streaming because they couldn’t find a trade and were wrecking themselves off-camera.

You have to be 100% responsible for yourself. But in periods of drawdown, you also have to coddle yourself a bit.

Prop yourself up.
Encourage yourself.
Constantly remind yourself: There is no emergency. There is no urgent need to get this back right now.

The only part of you that’s uncomfortable holding that drawdown is Retail Rick—the gambler inside you. He’s the one craving that first high from the equity peak. He’s the one who wants to get back there fast.

The trader in you doesn’t feel that way. The trader is the one pushing the buttons and managing risk according to the model.

The analyst in you isn’t worried about the drawdown either—that’s not their job. Their job is to keep you on the straight and narrow:

“This is what we’re supposed to be doing right now.”

The trader says:

“This is how I’m executing based on what the analyst is telling me. I’m managing risk.”

Meanwhile Retail Rick is in the back, clawing for the steering wheel, desperate to floor it straight into a tree.

In trading, most people try to do everything wrong: they trade recklessly, they gamble, and they try to win it all back in one day. That’s the worst possible approach.

You think that if you can recover your drawdown quickly, it means you’re a better trader. It doesn’t. It just means you’re a lucky gambler. Lucky gambling does nothing for me. I’m not impressed by someone who cranks the leverage to insane levels, hits a big winner, and parades it around. People do the exact same thing with lottery tickets and slot machines—there’s no skill in that. They were just in the right place at the right time, and circumstances lined up once. That’s it. No edge. No craft. No professionalism.

YOLO over-leveraged trading is the same thing. There is no skill in that.

What does impress me is consistency. If you can sit there with one contract, follow a clearly defined model—

“This is what I’m going to do.”
“This is exactly how much I’m willing to risk.”
“I will never go above that.”
“If I take a loss, I stop for this session and come back next session or next day.”

—and you stick to that all year and end up making $50,000? I’m seriously impressed. That’s pure skill. That’s 100% responsibility. That means you own your decisions, you control yourself, and you can stay inside your model without drifting. That is far more impressive than whatever big PnL number someone flashes on social media. Money is relative. Discipline is not.

As a trader, I respect people who:

Own their mistakes.
Don’t go reckless.
Don’t jack up the leverage just to “fix” a loss on some tiny move.

That’s not trading—that’s gambling. And I’m completely against that mentality.

This is why I sound “boring” as a mentor: I teach you to aim for very small, clear targets in the beginning. You start small on purpose. If you have a functioning brain, you’ll realize that this is all you actually need to build an amazing career: consistent small wins.

If you can reliably find 5 handles, that’s huge.

How many times a day does the market offer a 5-handle move? Plenty. You’re not limited to one opportunity. But you must first learn to recognize a clean 5-handle setup and execute on it consistently. As you do that, you learn more about:

How you react in real time.
What setups you see best.
What conditions you handle well.

Then, other models open up to you. Suddenly you’re seeing 10-handle moves in a session. Sometimes 20 handles in a day or more. And it doesn’t need to be some giant trending day—you can trade intraday swings up and down.

Later, you can trade without a strong intraday bias if your skill set allows it. But in the beginning, you cannot. You don’t know what you’re doing yet, and trading “both ways” with no bias will just expose that.

So early on, you focus on directional trading:

Are we likely in a bullish day or a bearish day?
Which side makes sense to focus on?
What time of day do the cleanest setups tend to show?

You’re not doing that because that’s the only style you’ll ever use, but because you need a baseline—a simple framework you can track and measure your progress against.

And when you go into drawdown?

You go straight back to basics:

Bullish day or bearish day?
Which side am I focusing on?
What session/time window tends to give me the easiest setups?

Strip it down, simplify, and hunt for the clean “silver bullet” setups—nothing fancy, just disciplined execution.

Give me something to go home with, okay?

When you’re in drawdown and you absolutely feel like you need that one trade you can trust—the silver-bullet setup you’re hunting for—where does it show up? Where does it form? And how can you use it even when you’re not in drawdown, since it shows up consistently?

Where is it, ICT? Come on, spill it. After all this buildup and all this bullshit, put the cards on the table.

Here it is:

Between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. New York time, you will find a fair value gap that will deliver five handles, every single day.

Guaranteed. Absolutely fucking guaranteed.

There will never be a day—even on a total shit-show day like Friday—where it isn’t there, reaching for an opposing pool of liquidity: sell-side or buy-side.

If I need to do something because of homeschooling with the kids, or something with the dogs, or anything else that keeps me from being there right at the 9:30 open, I don’t stress. I know that as long as I get to my charts by 10:00 and stay until 11:00, I can take something out every fucking day. Every day. Even on those shortened holiday sessions when the market closes early.

Don’t believe me? Don’t take my fucking word for it. Go back through your charts and see for yourself. It’s always there. Absolutely guaranteed, 100%. That’s your silver bullet. That’s your “pass the funded account” setup. That’s your “win the Robbins Cup” model. Everything you’re looking for happens between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. New York time, every single day.

On the 1-minute, 30-second, or 15-second chart, you will find it in one of those three timeframes. All you have to do is wait for the obvious run on liquidity—ask yourself: is it reaching for buy-side or sell-side? As long as that move has at least a 6-handle range, you can pull 5 out of it. That’s all it means: if a fair value gap forms on the 15s, 30s, or 1-minute chart, and you know where price is reaching for, you can enter even “late” in the move. I don’t give a fuck; it’s not chasing when you understand what you’re doing. A fair value gap is in the middle—that’s where the meat is on the bone, baby.

You’re looking at your charts thinking you have to nail the very top or the very bottom, like you need the tiny joint ends of a chicken leg. Precision isn’t limited to that. Where’s all the meat on a drumstick? Not on the ends—it’s in the middle. Thick, full, that’s what you want. The ends are skinny, all tendon and gristle; nobody wants to chew on that. The fair value gap is how you enter a move that’s already in progress and still get the meat.

To outsiders who don’t know how to read price, it looks like you’re chasing. “Oh, ICT, that’s revenge trading, you’re chasing price.” Get the fuck out of here. They have no idea what they’re looking at and no idea what I’m doing to get into those trades. You’re learning it this year: it’s not chasing.

If I know price is going to run for liquidity, and it’s already moved and I’ve missed the “best” entry, and we’ve already had a fair value gap that price respected and won’t return to (in a bullish scenario), then I drop to the 1-minute, 30-second, or 15-second chart and look for the next fair value gap to form. The next one that shows up, I’m in that trade. Boom—take my 5 handles (or more, depending on the day) as it runs from that fair value gap to the liquidity I’m targeting. I submit to that idea, let it play out, and let the algorithm do the rest.

We know what we’re doing. We’re trained to look at price with a spirit of anticipation—we’re not reacting to shit, we’re waiting. Our scope is already dialed in at a specific time of day, at levels we know it’s going to be delivered to. And when it happens? Fucking fireworks.

We know exactly what the fuck we’re doing. We’re not wondering what’s going to happen; we’re waiting for it. We’re fucking waiting. Put it on a platter for us, because we’re taking it home.

That’s how we operate here. We are trained fucking killers. This motherfucker has nothing we can’t handle. Not one thing—not one fucking thing these markets do is a surprise to us.

This business operates the same way: everything is delivered in time. I give you windows of opportunity to study, because you’re going to learn exactly when they repeat. There are small windows inside the timeframe that are my kill zones. I’m giving you the opportunity to focus your attention there. Some of my better students have done solid research, seen exactly where I’m leading you, and they see it happen every day. It delivers consistently.

There’s no reason for you to look at any kind of drawdown and think, “What am I going to do?” You’re going to fucking trade. You’re going to fix it—but you’re also going to compensate for the level of damage you brought on yourself by creating that drawdown.

Drawdown and losing trades have only done one thing: they’ve made you doubt yourself. That’s it. That’s the only thing that’s changed. Your confidence got dinged. But it’s okay. Nothing else has changed. The market still operates exactly like it did before your losing trades. The only thing you did was let yourself go off the rails.

Step away from the charts. Slow down. Recalibrate. Think about why you started doing this in the first place. Go back to your model and read it out loud. Meditate on it. Go back through your journal from when you were doing things correctly. Remind yourself that you do know what you’re doing—you just reacted emotionally. You chased something that wasn’t the trade; you chased fixing an emotional response to a mistake you made as a human being, and then you compounded it with recklessness.

That’s all that happened. There is no emergency. Your model didn’t stop working. You’re not even looking at your model when you’re trying to “fix” what you did to yourself. It’s not the model that’s broken—it’s the operator that’s drunk. Think about it. You know what I just said is true. Whatever made you money before—you’ve got to go back to that.

Drawdown is not the end of a career. A blown account is not the end of a career. But every time one of those happens – if not both – it changes you. It dents and replaces that optimism you had when you first started, when you were stacking equity high after equity high. You need to go back and tap into that version of you.

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard because you’re pissed at yourself. You’re embarrassed that other people might know you did it to yourself. But that’s normal. Everybody does dumb shit in every area of life. You’re not special there. The question is: are you going to willfully carry that shame with you every day while you trade? Are you going to keep measuring yourself against that one drawdown you caused or that account you blew?

Be practical. Does your spouse constantly bring up that one time you messed up years ago? If they do, that’s toxic – it makes the relationship hard and it needs to be fixed. So why would you do that with your relationship to the market and your model? Why keep dragging out that one bad episode?

“Yeah, you did that trade right… but remember that one time you screwed everything up and went into drawdown?” – if you keep replaying that, of course you’re going to feel like shit.

You have to nurture yourself emotionally and psychologically. You have to keep out anything that distracts you or makes you feel less than. That’s the weeds. Don’t let weeds grow in your garden. You have to prune and till the ground constantly – watch for anything that becomes a distraction, an impediment to your development, that pulls you out of the mindset you actually need.

My students are bringing the receipts, and I’m proud of them. And I’m proud of you, even if right now it’s still “in the making.” You might have gone into drawdown, you might have done some damage to yourself – especially on a Friday morning like this one where the session was pure seek-and-destroy: up, down, up, down, up, down.

If you fell victim to that, it’s okay. You will fall victim to it again in the future too. Sometimes a seek-and-destroy day starts off looking exactly like one of those “clean directional” days where everything seems obvious… and then it snaps, reverses, and makes you think it’s doing something completely different. It tricks you. And then you get hit again.

In that moment, you have to know what to do: stop.

If you’ve taken two losing trades in the same session, stop trading that session.

You’ve already been given a “silver bullet”: there will be a fair value gap between 10:00 and 11:00 New York time every single day. If you take losses in the morning, stop trading the morning session and wait for the PM session.

Your goal for the afternoon is not “get it all back and finish green.”

Your goal is simply: recover 50% of the drawdown from the morning.

You can get all of it back and more, but your objective should be that modest 50%. That’s far more forgiving than “I must get it all back and still finish positive for the day. I have to be right.” There’s a huge difference between those two mindsets.

As a trader, sometimes it’s not about the trophy win. Sometimes it’s “I took a hit, I got back half, and I’m content with that. I lived to fight another day.” Then you let time and repetition do their job, because these opportunities will keep coming: every week, every day. The market isn’t going anywhere.

The only way you get taken out is if you let Retail Rick and impulsiveness run the show. Think back to the days you blew an account or wrecked your week: if you rewind honestly, there was always a moment where you told yourself, “I probably shouldn’t do this…” and then you said, “Ah, screw it, I’m going in.”

That was the test.

And you failed it.

Every single time that’s happened in my career, I can look back and know: I saw it coming. I knew I shouldn’t, and I did it anyway.

In this business, if you “fuck around and find out,” you can find yourself out of the business entirely. You can cause more damage to yourself financially than you’re equipped to recover from. Don’t believe it? Try over-leveraging right in front of CPI or FOMC – you’ll quickly discover you owe the broker, not the other way around.

So you have to be very careful about the expectations you put on yourself when:

you’re trying to recuperate drawdown
you’re trying to push to new equity highs

Any time you feel, “I know this probably isn’t the right thing to do, but I want to do it anyway,” that’s your cue: wait. Step away.

Take 10 minutes. Go get a drink. Walk the dog. Breathe. Then come back.

If the trade moved without you? So what. It’s not the last setup the market will ever give you.

If it moved against where you would’ve entered, you’ll be grateful you stepped aside.

If it moved but hasn’t yet reached the level you’re aiming for, and you have a clear, rule-based entry model (like an institutional order flow entry with a fair value gap), then you still have a controlled way to get in – not chasing price.

So why are you pressuring yourself? Why are you making this harder than it has to be?

Because the whole battle is between your ears.

The war isn’t on the chart. The war is in your head.

The candles don’t know you’re in a trade.

The algorithm doesn’t know you exist.

Price is going where it’s scripted to go: to liquidity, to inefficiencies, to premiums and discounts. Its job is to punish whoever is foolish enough to stand on the wrong side. That’s the reality.

So take the pressure off “being right,” and take the pressure off “fixing drawdown immediately.”

Fixing drawdown slowly and correctly is the proper way to do it.

I know what high-probability is. I know how to define it. My students know how to define it. I also know when it’s not present in the marketplace. I only press the button when those conditions are met, and I try to teach you how to stay out when they’re not.

How long do new week opening gaps hold importance for me? Sixty days—within the date ranges I’ve laid out in my core content.

What I’ve already released is enough for people to use and make a lot of money. Some will fail, some will lose money—that doesn’t change the fact that the material works. It just means they did themselves in. That’s human nature. Sometimes you just mess up.

When that happens, you need to make adjustments, recalibrate, and get back on the horse. But you cannot do that if you lose control and focus. If you can’t stop yourself when you’re out of control—when you’re doing reckless, stupid things trying to get back to an equity high or “fix” a losing trade—you’ll do far more damage psychologically than you do to your account.

You start creating scar tissue in your learning and in your perception of yourself and your trading. Scar tissue doesn’t stretch; it doesn’t have elasticity. That makes growth harder and more painful. That’s what happens when you move forward with a toxic mindset: you’re limited, and that’s why many traders quit—they can’t get past that layer of scar tissue they’ve built.

I teach and lecture the way I do so you don’t have to go through that needlessly. It’s always self-inflicted. Am I teaching you how to trade without ever taking a loss? No. I’m teaching you how to avoid blowing your account, how to endure drawdown and mitigate it.

Losing trades are going to happen. That’s the human side of this—you will do it wrong sometimes. That’s where the losses come from, not because the concepts are flawed, but because you executed incorrectly. I authored this material and even I still get it wrong sometimes. I can get stubborn, emotional, or feel like I have something to prove, and the moment I let that external nonsense into my decision-making, I’ve invited chaos in—and chaos always shows up on time.

So when you’re in drawdown, you cannot be doing the things that promote speed, aggression, and “getting it back quickly.” That’s the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

Because as a young man, I blew myself up a lot with dumb shit. I’m not making this up as I go – I lived it. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re “doing the right things” and only later see that every part of what you were doing to “fix” the situation – the drawdown, the quick re-entry, the instant refunding of another account – was the worst possible response.

How does that apply to you today?

If you have a funded account challenge, pass it, and get funded – or you open a live account with your own money – that was your decision. I never told you to do that. So when do you actually know you’re ready to transition from demo to live?

When you’re bored with being consistently profitable in demo.

When you have no emotional response – you don’t care if a trade wins, you don’t care if it loses. That’s when your mindset is right.

If you’re still:

Antsy
Excited about being right
Obsessed with the outcome of each trade

…you are not ready. Because you’re bringing emotion into real-money transactions. You’ll constantly see each trade as a scorecard: profitable or not profitable. And if that’s where your focus is, it’s not on the model and the actual role of the trade. You’re not trading your plan; you’re trading your feelings.

Ask yourself honestly:

When I put a trade on, how often do my eyes go straight to the profit & loss line?

If the answer is “all the time,” you’re not ready for live money. You’re focused on the dollar amount, not price. Price is constantly giving you feedback: Am I onside? Am I offside? Is this trade still valid? But you’re glued to the P&L, watching it tick up and down like a slot machine.

I only show P&L on screen so you can see a button was pushed. When I’m actually trading, I don’t have that visible. I don’t care about it. I’m watching:

Is price going to my target?
Is it respecting the last three PD arrays I’m focused on?
Is it still aligned with the idea I framed?

That’s what matters. If I’m not watching that, I won’t see when the trade stops being valid.

Now compare that to how you behave:

You put a trade on. You’re up, say, $750, and you start this little negotiation with yourself:

“If it just gets to $1,000, I’ll get out, I promise.”
It drops: now you’re up only $250.
“Okay, forget $1,000, just give me back $750 and I swear I’ll close.”
It keeps fluctuating, and you keep bargaining.

You’re not watching price anymore. You’re watching the money, begging the platform to flash the number you want. That’s not trading. That’s you turning into a desperate gambler staring at a slot machine.

The chart might be screaming at you that you’re on the wrong side:

The structure has shifted
A key bar has violated what should hold
The context is gone

…but you’re blind to it, because all you see is the P&L bouncing around.

Everyone goes through this. Every trader who’s ever put real money at risk has had the “please, just let it hit X and I’ll get out” moment. Some of you might even be laughing reading this because it’s so familiar. But honestly, it’s not funny. It’s the moment you’ve lost the plot.

Once you’re:

Praying to the screen
Negotiating with yourself about arbitrary dollar amounts
Saying “I need it to do this”

…you’re no longer submitting to your trade idea. You’re not following the model. You’re gambling and hoping. You’ve turned into a religious trader: “Please, please let it get there and I’ll be good next time.” Who are you talking to? The monitor?

If you catch yourself doing that, the best thing you can do is flatten the trade. Close it. Get out.

“Yes, but sometimes it would have hit my original target.”

Sure. But you already proved you weren’t willing to sit through that honestly. You didn’t have the patience or the emotional control to see it through. Staying in it while half-praying, half-panicking doesn’t build discipline – it just reinforces the idea that:

Your feelings matter more than the model
Random dollar levels matter more than structure

That’s poison.

It’s not weakness to get out of a trade if you know you can’t handle it anymore. That’s self-awareness. If it later hits your full target, you note it and move on: “If I’d stayed, it would’ve worked. Good. Next time I’ll be more aligned with the plan.” That’s constructive.

But acting like you’re supposed to go full size, hold full position, with no partials, and calmly capture every pip or handle from day one? That’s delusional. Nobody starts like that. My best students don’t start like that. I don’t teach that.

I teach partials for a reason:

They always pay.
They always book something.
They always reinforce that following the plan gets rewarded.

You grow into holding longer. You earn the right to hold full size by building experience and emotional control. Until then, your job isn’t to be a hero – it’s to execute your model, manage yourself, and stop letting that little P&L box dictate your every decision.

When the market gives you a clean chance to take money out of it, take it—especially when you’re inexperienced. You might be in a move that’s short-lived, and the “target” you’ve drawn may never actually materialize.

In the beginning, you can’t treat every trade like you’re going to ride it until the wheels fall off. You have to be objective and reasonable with yourself. Acknowledge: “I’m inexperienced. I might be completely wrong about where this is going.” But if the market has already offered you 5 or 10 handles while you’re aiming for 30, that’s the moment to say:

“Let me take something at +5.”
“Let me take something at +10.”

You’re not going to nail huge R-multiple payouts right away. You simply don’t have the emotional capacity or screen time yet to hold for them. You grow into that.

I take trades all the time where I have a “best case” limit order far away. I’m not always saying, “Price must go exactly there.” I’m saying, “If we get one of those wild, extended runs, I want to be there to catch it.” If you don’t have a limit order sitting there, and price spikes into that level, you can’t make money off a move you never asked to be filled on.

At the same time, I’m always taking partials on the way. That proves the idea is working and pays me without needing the final target. That’s what I’m teaching you:

Get paid without needing to be perfectly right.

I wish I’d learned that at 20. It would’ve saved me many blown accounts. I had trades deeply in profit, refused to take anything off, held stubbornly for the “full target,” and watched them reverse, stop me out, and turn into a net loss.

Never let a winning trade go all the way back and become a loser.

If the market is moving in your favor and has given you 5 handles, take something.

“But what if I’m only trading one contract?”

Then take the whole trade off. Book it. Grow your knowledge and experience until you can:

Consistently spot 5-handle moves
Then 10-handle moves
And sit through the discomfort without yanking it at +5 every time

Eventually you’ll be able to say, “I’ll take partial at +5, partial at +10, and let the rest reach for the full objective.” If it comes back and stops you on the remainder at breakeven, you still got paid. That’s how you frame it.

It’s all perception.

You will eventually get results you can build on and actually feel confident about—and that kind of confidence is necessary in this industry. But it’s never overnight success. It wasn’t for me, and it won’t be for you. Along the way you’re going to learn a lot about yourself, including the very traits you think are strengths that are actually problems.

What’s ironic is that the qualities people brag about are often exactly what screw them up. “I’m confident” usually means “I’m overconfident,” and that’s how you blow an account.

The same thing happens with people who say, “I’m very patient.” They become too patient. They sit there waiting for some imaginary, perfect setup, and while they’re waiting, the move has already started without them. In the beginning, you don’t even know what true precision looks like, so you can’t demand perfection from yourself. Over time, as you study price delivery, see where it should go, and watch it actually play out, you’ll learn to recognize precise, high-quality setups and then you can lean into precision.

At the start, don’t try to force perfection. Be forgiving with yourself: let the run start, wait for the retrace, wait for the fair value gap, then get in. You won’t catch the exact high or low—and you don’t need to.

I mean, you’re not getting in at the very top on the Turtle Soup / false breakout. You’re waiting for displacement first, then a retracement back up into a premium, and that’s where you’re looking to go short. You’re aiming for consequent encroachment and the lower portion of the fair value gap – that’s your sweet spot, your optimal entry inside the FVG.

You always have to allow for the possibility that the fair value gap won’t be completely filled. When it doesn’t fully fill and then price breaks and runs away in your direction, that’s powerful information. If you’re expecting lower prices and the FVG can’t even be fully filled before it sells off, that’s a strong sign it may go much further than you initially thought. In those cases, you can push your partial take-profits a bit lower, because the move is likely to extend.

Often, your final target is probably not the best one – the market will usually offer more than you first expected. Your first partial, though, should always be reasonable: five to ten handles on indices, or 10–20 pips in FX, for example. That’s where you start taking something off.

Anyone telling you that, from day one, you should be nailing perfect precision and holding every trade all the way to the full target is guaranteeing they’re not consistently profitable. They’re not consistent, they’re not confident in their own execution, and they’re coaching from the sidelines while ignoring the realities of how traders actually develop.

I’m telling you to take partials because I want you to trust your own progress as you move up in understanding.

In the beginning, you’re going to have doubts. You’re going to lack confidence. That’s normal. You overcome that with small, controlled wins: paying yourself at logical levels the way I’m teaching you.

It feels much better to be learning, miss the ultimate target, but still walk away with money taken out of the move. You invested time, focus, and energy into that idea and you were rewarded for it. That reinforces the right behavior.

But if you hold for everything, take no partials, and it completely reverses on you, you’ll start thinking:

“This is bullshit. Nobody makes money. I won’t be successful. Why am I even studying this?”

…and then it’s easy to spiral into “Two years of ICT for nothing, screw this, I’m done.”

That’s why I teach you to reward yourself. Take the cookie you’re digging for in the jar—grab one.

If you take a partial and later price comes back and stops you out at breakeven, does it really hurt? Not in the same way. You got paid. That’s exactly the point.

You now have a positive outcome in your journal/demo that rewards your time and study. And in your head you can say:

“If this were real money, I still made money. I don’t need to be perfectly right.”

Bingo.

That’s the proper mindset.

We’re not 50/50 here. Okay? We’re not doing that. That’s unacceptable. Period.

You should be aiming for, and living in, a 70% strike rate. That’s your fucking goal.

Are you going to hit that right out of the box?

No.

Are you going to get that in your first year?

No.

But a few years from now, you will be there. You’ll start to recognize when the conditions are not favorable for you to trade—when high probability and low resistance are not lining up, when things are conflicting. And when you see that, you’ll stay out of the marketplace.

You want low resistance and high probability. You’ll learn to identify when the market is like that, and that’s when you trade with your maximum risk.

Not this bullshit of:

“I’m in drawdown, I need something to happen, so I’m going to trade with maximum leverage in high-resistance liquidity and low-probability conditions because I’ve gotta fix it.”

That’s how you end up praying to the screen, hoping it gives you what you’re asking for…

…and then you blow your account.

People who’ve actually been trading know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. They’ve been there. I guarantee they can appreciate this level of discussion, because now it finally makes sense how they messed up, how to avoid it going forward, and they wish they’d heard it before they blew themselves up.

The same thing you’re hearing right now, you probably don’t fully appreciate yet, because you haven’t traded with real money. You haven’t gone through those growth phases and the real growing pains. And you will go through them. In this industry, growth and understanding come through pain—and your natural instinct is going to be to avoid that pain.

The surest way to reinforce following your rules is pain.

How do you avoid those painful experiences?

You don’t. You go through them. You walk forward without quitting. That’s how this works.

Because what you’re really asking as a trader is: “How do I avoid losing?”

I don’t have an answer for that. Nobody does. There is no 100% strike rate. Ever. It’s not going to happen. I can’t give you that, I can’t teach you that, and I will never promise you that.

What I can promise is this: you will learn to read price action more clearly than anything else out there can teach you.

And at some point—this is the grey area—it will click. You’ll get really, really good and consistent at reading price. You’ll start getting bored with being right. Your analysis plays out, the market moves in your favor, and there’s no emotional charge anymore. You don’t care in the sense of excitement or fear. There’s no spike of happiness, no sting of regret. You just knew what was likely to happen, you knew how you’d respond, and that’s exactly what unfolded.

That moment will come for you, but it will come much later than you want it to. I promise you that.

When you finally reach that stage—where it feels like that for you—then you can seriously consider trading live funds, if you choose.

Anytime before that, you are not prepared. You’re just rushing to do something you’re not ready for.

Outline

Keep the lesson connected to your own data.