How To Trade Big Runners Properly

Date: 2023-06-24

How to trade the big runners properly.

What does that mean?

Well, have you ever been in a trade where the idea you first used or implemented to enter was something along the lines of, “If I can get 15 pips, or if I can get 10 handles out of this run, that’s what I’m aiming for”?

And then something happens, and it’s almost like love at first sight.

That market you entered into rubs you just the right way, flirts with you, and now you’re in love.

Now you want to marry it.

You want to hold on to it for the entire daily range—or beyond that, if it’s early in the week.

This is something you’ve now fallen in love with, and it’s going to become a weekly hold.

Then something happens where you’ve reached the initial objective you set out for in the trade.

It’s gone to it, and now we’re past it.

We’re in new territory.

And that question comes to mind:

“Am I doing the right thing?”

“Am I doing the right thing by holding on for this big grand-slam home run?”

“Did I make a mistake by not getting out?”

“Should I get out?”

“If I take the trade off here, it’s going to run, and I’m going to regret it.”

But what happens if I hold on to it and it reverses, goes back beyond where I was aiming for with my target, and maybe even goes farther?

It scares me.

It gets me out of the trade.

And you mismanage it entirely.

If you’ve ever traded with live money, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

It happens all the time.

No matter who you are, what style of trader you are, whether you’ve traded with my concepts or somebody else’s stuff, you will have this event take place in your trading and throughout the career path you’ve chosen.

It’s something that’s going to creep in.

And what will happen is, sometimes you’ll have a tiger by the tail, but you’ll let go of it.

Then it’ll run.

It’ll run 300 or 500 pips or handles.

Not really—I mean, you wouldn’t have held on to it for several days.

But that’s how you’ll beat yourself up:

“If I had just held on to it.”

And the question becomes, how do you, as a trader, overcome that and graduate from, say, being a five-handle trader or a 20-handle trader on Nasdaq?

And for the folks who ask all the time, “If you’re trying to do five handles on ES, what should it be on Nasdaq?”

Twenty.

There’s your multiplier, okay?

But with the idea of holding on to a trade for a big runner, number one, let’s get one thing straight:

That is not greed.

That’s graduation.

You’re graduating to another threshold of trading.

When I teach you that five-handle run to start with, all that is is something very small and easily obtainable each day.

Now, in the beginning, it’s going to be next to impossible for you to feel confident or even know what it is you’re looking for to get those five handles.

But after a while, doing it over and over and over again, you’re going to get bored with it real quick.

Now, there’s a blanket statement that says all successful, consistently profitable trading should be boring.

Yes.

But you should not be doing only five-handle trades in perpetuity.

You need to eventually grow beyond that.

But what happens if your personality prevents that from happening and you just never get beyond it?

There’s nothing wrong with that.

As long as you’re consistently profitable and you’re able to do that, you get your five handles, out the door you go, and live your life for the day.

But I’m talking to the folks who know that five handles is just that first rung on the ladder you’re going to climb throughout a long career of being consistently profitable.

That’s the path you’re going on.

That’s what you’re aiming for.

So what you’re going to have to endure is figuring out where your target is and where your comfort zone is.

All of you are going to have different thresholds.

When I set out to be a trader, I traded Forex and tried to trade the One Shot, One Kill, where I’m trying to get the lion’s portion of the weekly range.

I settled in with 50 to 75 pips.

It was easy for me to get 50 to 75 pips every single week—outlining it, showcasing it, trading it, executing it, and letting everyone see it.

Now people are out there doing it.

But that’s not the entirety of a full weekly range, right?

It became really easy for me to juggle and manage the mentorships I was running, the video production, the editing, and all those things.

So your personal life, your family, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your career at work until you can leave it, and sleep—all of those things are going to compete and play tug-of-war with you.

And you have to be realistic.

You just can’t go out there like Babe Ruth, swinging for the fences and knocking it out of the park.

Not right away, you can’t.

But you can get there.

And I see folks in my email inbox.

Folks send me messages on TradingView.

I see other YouTubers talk about this topic.

And I’ll give you the recipe that I use and teach my students, okay?

It’ll be up to you whether or not you find any value in it.

But I have turned failed traders into consistently profitable traders.

I’ve turned breakeven traders into consistently profitable traders.

I’ve taken small, fragmented fluctuations of profitability in certain traders and made them able to find big, grand-slam home runs.

Now, every single day is not a grand-slam opportunity.

But I’m going to pose a question to you:

What happens if you get, say, 40% to 60% of the daily range?

Wouldn’t that be considered the lion’s portion of the daily range?

I’m not saying you have to be perfect and get the highest high and the lowest low.

But anywhere between 40% and 60% of the daily range in whatever market you’re trading—would you be content with that?

Some of you, because you’re probably new, would think, “No. I’ve seen what you’ve been able to do, ICT. I want to do that.”

Okay.

That’s a goal.

But I’m talking about going out after you’ve reached five handles consistently.

Then you graduate to doing 10 handles consistently.

Then you work toward maybe trading Nasdaq, where you can get your 20 and then 40 handles in that index.

At some point, you’re going to get bored with it.

And you’re going to want to spread your wings and grow.

That is something you should not be fearful of.

But too many times, individual traders like you and me will go out there in the early stages and think we can bite off more than we typically do in our previous endeavors.

“I’m ready. Let’s get in there and try to do 10 contracts.”

“I’ve never done 10 contracts before in my funded account or trading challenges.”

“I’ve never done these things before.”

“Let’s just do it today.”

“Let’s take a leap of faith and do it.”

That’s a mistake.

You have to graduate into it slowly.

And there’s an invisible barrier that traders face.

I promise I’m going to give you some how-tos in a minute, but I want to set the stage for this.

Because if you’ve never been here before, if you’ve never traded with live funds before, and you’ve never felt the tug-of-war of, “What happens if I’m wrong? This is really going to take money out of my account. Am I going to be able to sleep tonight?”

If you’ve never had that exposure or experience, this is going to sound alien to you.

It’s not going to have the same impact that it does for the individuals listening who absolutely have had real risk with real money.

So there’s this invisible barrier, okay?

You never notice it until you get to that threshold.

You’re at that precipice where you want to hold for a little bit more.

Just a little bit more.

“I want to go for that 50-handle run.”

“I want to go for that 100-pip rally.”

“I want to hold for that 200-point rally or decline because some big event took place, and I feel like it’s going to rip.”

Any other time, when you’re trading your five handles and getting out when you hit it, you’re content with it.

There isn’t this invisible barrier out there.

But then, when you start wanting to do more, where you know that if you could be consistent with this just a few times a month, wow—what would that do for your trading?

That would really set you apart.

You’d be top tier.

You’d be in this upper echelon of trading.

Everybody would look up to you.

You’d feel good about yourself.

And you’d feel like these were really respectable results.

Because you probably aren’t thinking that getting your five handles consistently every single day is respectable, when it is.

It absolutely is.

So it’s a balancing act that has to be maintained throughout your growth.

In the beginning, you’re scared shitless.

You don’t know what you’re doing.

You’re afraid to take a trade.

You’re afraid to lose.

You don’t want to be wrong.

So you’re worrying about all the wrong things in the beginning.

But once you work all that stuff out through experience, conditioning yourself with backtesting and demo trading, and then work your way into a very low threshold of real monetary risk, when you decide to get into live-fund trading, you start with a very small amount of leverage.

And the graduation from that is going to be slow.

Not fast.

Slow.

And the reason why it must be slow is because you don’t know what it feels like to do it.

For instance, can you do a full side split right now?

At your age, whatever it is, and at your level of athleticism, can you just drop down right now and go into a side split?

I’ll be 51, and I can do that.

I’ve been doing it since I was seven years old.

Now, some of you might think, “Well, what the hell does that have to do with trading, Michael?”

You have to know your limitations.

You’re not flexible enough yet to go out there and simply reach into 10 or 15 contracts and start trading.

Now, I’m going to set the analogy for the sake of the rest of the discussion here because a lot of my students are trying to use the funded-account route.

They don’t have a lot of money, and they want to go that route because it allows them to do that.

And if they make a mistake, all they have to do is reset, and it’s cheap.

Okay, I’m not here to say that’s the best way of dealing with it or the right or wrong way of doing it.

But I’m just going to speak in those terms.

I watched my son and his attempts to do these things.

And the account he tried to use allowed him up to 15 contracts.

And while that is theoretically available to you, should you be doing it?

No.

Even if you’re conditioned to trading for, I don’t know, 30% of the daily range, and you can get that four times out of the week, you still shouldn’t go to the upper echelon of leverage.

Just because it’s offered to you, don’t touch it.

Think of that like a rattlesnake.

Now, you might be able to grab that rattlesnake before it strikes.

You might be able to dodge its fangs and pin it down to the ground.

Or it might bite your ass, and you’ll regret reaching for it.

So treat that maximum lot size or contract size like a rattlesnake.

It’s an enticement.

But don’t touch it.

Your job is to desensitize yourself over time.

Desensitize yourself from the fear of missing out and the fear of failure—the failure of choosing the trade you’re trying to hold on to for a longer run.

I’m going to tell you the secret behind what causes that and how you overcome it.

There are a couple of things you have to know about.

But once you understand these things, you’ll know exactly when to take those types of trades.

You won’t fumble it.

You won’t second-guess it.

You’ll just know, “This is the thing I should be doing. This is not the thing I should be doing.”

The first thing you have to understand is that you must have a higher-timeframe draw on liquidity.

That’s what I’m teaching you throughout all the coursework and content I put on my YouTube channel.

And when I’m talking to you in these Twitter Spaces, I’m conditioning you to look at that higher-timeframe draw.

Because if you don’t consider and understand that, how are you ever going to trust these intraday fluctuations and think to yourself, “I’m going to hold for a 100-handle run”?

Can a 100-handle run be birthed and manifest itself in a range that has already moved several hundred handles down and is really close, in terms of proximity, to a higher-timeframe draw on liquidity?

In other words, if we think it’s going to go to a specific price level lower and it’s the last day of the week, does it have the potential to move another 100 handles beyond that target?

I mean, sure it can.

But if it’s more likely that it’s only going to go to where we set our attention—to some fair value gap, some old low where liquidity is—why would you, on that particular day and at that particular time of day, expect your trade to somehow rub you the right way and now think it’s going to be a big runner?

So there has to be some frame of reference.

That’s exactly why I take everybody to a weekly chart.

That weekly candlestick—what is it likely to reach for?

And if we don’t know what it is on the weekend before trading starts, we use Monday to ascertain that information.

Then you work throughout the entirety of the week to see where it is reaching for.

Now, step one is that you have to know what the higher-timeframe draw is.

Where is it reaching for on a higher-timeframe chart?

It doesn’t have to be the weekly chart.

I just prefer to teach my students to focus there.

But if it’s not clear, then at the very minimum, you must have some idea on the daily chart.

What is it reaching for?

Today, Friday, June 23, 2023, in the morning session, I sent out a tweet showing you the daily charts for both ES and Nasdaq.

And I said that I favored the lower fair value gap on ES, not the one above, but the lower one.

Obviously, you know we’ve been focusing on Nasdaq as the upside leadership index.

So if we’re looking for shorts, which one would be more likely to deliver to its target, Nasdaq or ES?

ES.

Because it has not kept up with Nasdaq on the upside.

It’s been the laggard.

So when it becomes time for the market to sell off, or when we’re looking for discount arrays in a bearish market, which market is going to be easier?

You’re probably thinking, “Well, the one that went up more has more room to come down, so that’s the one to sell short.”

No.

That’s the one that’s going to be more reluctant to go down because it’s the relative-strength leader on the upside.

So we want to focus on the weaker index or Forex pair.

Having a higher-timeframe draw on liquidity, let’s say that daily fair value gap on ES, if you look at your daily chart and mark that off, you’ll see that we actually did go into it by one tick.

But that’s still going there.

Nasdaq was unable to do that.

There was a large Opening Range Gap.

Both ES and Nasdaq had that today.

We were able to see them trade lower, and you watched me execute.

I shared that today.

I actually put on a trade in both ES and Nasdaq, and I showed you what I was looking at in real time.

And I canceled and closed the ES short in profit because it wasn’t showing the willingness to reach lower the way Nasdaq did.

So in the morning session, Nasdaq offered the opportunity to see expansion lower, even though it failed to get into its daily fair value gap.

So when you’re looking for trades to hold on to and you want to catch a runner, you have to know what you’re trying to reach for.

And you also have to know where the market is indicating that it’s not willing to do so.

I showed you that today.

I showed both markets side by side in real time, showing the executions, managing the positions, and then closing one because of something the charts were showing me.

Nasdaq was willing to open up with better market structure.

It was respecting its premium arrays.

And ES was rangy.

It wanted to come back too much on its retracements.

So if it’s becoming a less likely scenario that the market you’re in is going to be a runner, don’t hold on to the trade just because you want it to become one.

It’s going to be telling you something all the time.

It’s either going to be a hold, or it’s probably time to take a large portion of the trade off as a partial and then wait it out.

If you still don’t feel confident even after that, meaning after taking a sizable amount of the trade off, you may want to hold on to the full position.

A full position, whatever that position size is, and then you place your stop, it goes to the predetermined target, and that’s it.

You’ve taken no partials.

That’s called a full pull.

I teach you how to take partials because you won’t know how to do that initially, just like you won’t know how to hold on to a trade for a large, profitable runner.

There has to be something that desensitizes you, and that comes from trusting all the factors you’re using for higher-timeframe trading.

If you’re looking at a 3-minute, 2-minute, 5-minute, or 1-minute chart and trying to conclude that you’re going to hold for 100 handles, it’s going to be very, very difficult to do that without a higher-timeframe frame of reference.

You have to know what price is potentially reaching for.

Because if you don’t have that frame of mind when you’re in your trading charts, whether you’ve annotated them or not, you at least have to know what it’s likely to do.

You can’t look at a pivot number.

You can’t look at a standard deviation—that comes from my work.

You can’t look at a Fibonacci extension and think that’s all there is.

Those things are small cogs, small components of the larger whole.

And if you blend those things with something on a higher timeframe that would be used for the purpose of liquidity, or repricing to an inefficiency in price—a fair value gap or something to that effect—and those pivots and Fibonacci extensions begin to converge around that idea, then you have a better narrative to hold on to.

There has to be a storyline you can trust.

Because you can’t just go out there and buy a market thinking it’s going to go up 100 handles because you want it to.

There may be something up there you can make a case for.

But is the one thing you’re making the case around enough to make it feasible for you to trust that it might go 100 handles?

Because if you’re uncertain, your subconscious is probably really saying, “I want this to be a big runner because I want to show the world. I want to show my spouse. I just want to look in the mirror and say I did it.”

And there isn’t really enough evidence behind the idea of it going that far.

In the beginning stages, you have to wrestle through that.

I did that.

When you see me out here trading 100 handles, 80 handles, 70 handles—all these, you know, they’re not huge runs, but they’re not five or 20 handles either.

The way I get to that point is what I’m showing you.

I take partials off at logical levels.

I don’t need to take the partials off, but I do it so you can see by example.

Because everybody, when they learn from someone, talks like the person they learned from, wears the kinds of clothes they wear, and patterns and emulates the things they do.

Well, I know that as a mentor, I have an influence over you as a student.

So I’m teaching you by example.

I teach by example with a demo so you’re not embarrassed to do it.

And I also teach you to take partials because, until you see how it works and then weigh it against what you’ve been trying to do without being consistent, it’s easier for you to say, “You know what? I’m going to let go of what I thought I should be doing. I see him doing this. I’m going to try that.”

And when you take those partials off—which is the secret—that’s the secret to holding big-ass runners.

You’re not doing a full pull.

Okay, nobody just walks out there and starts doing that.

It takes time and conditioning.

So if you know that’s where you want to go in your trading, it doesn’t mean you’re getting 100 handles every day.

It doesn’t mean that.

It just means that when the market offers it to you on a silver platter, and here’s what it’s likely to do—I’ll get to those details in a second—you’ll know when to capitalize on it.

But the most important thing is knowing when not to do it.

And as a new trader, you probably are new, and you feel like, “I need to get out there and do this.”

And many of you probably forgot about the five handles.

You haven’t even become consistent with that part yet, and you already want to jump to the 30-handle, 50-handle, or 100-handle runs because you’re hearing and seeing other people show examples of their trades.

And now you think, “Why waste my time with these five handles? Let’s just jump into the grand-slam home runs.”

That’s what every trader does when they come into this business.

They jump too quickly and have no idea what they’re going to grab onto.

There’s nobody out there who’s going to catch you if you don’t get a grip on the thing you’re jumping up to reach for.

You’re trying to skip rungs on the ladder.

That’s dangerous.

It’s very, very dangerous.

And when you fall from those heights, many people don’t want to get back on the ladder.

They’re scared to go through the process again the right way.

They’re upset with themselves.

Now they’re scared.

They have fear.

That’s mental scar tissue.

You have to allow doing the right things to reward you.

Going back to the analogy of doing funded-account challenge stuff, okay?

So that’s the pathway you chose.

I went day by day, showing my account statements—the winners and the losers.

It’s on my YouTube channel.

I think the playlist is called “First-Year Trading Results,” or something like “Expectations and What You Should Expect.”

One contract made 100% in five weeks.

It took $25,000 to $50,000.

There were a lot of losing trades and a lot of drawdown, so I could show traders in my private mentorship how to get out of that.

With one contract, take one contract and make $25,000 a month.

Are you fucking making $25,000 a month at your job right now?

The Mickey Mouse shit you’re trying to do with your trading now—overleveraging and all that.

How many times have you tried to do the funded-account challenge?

How many times have you passed?

How many times have you passed it and then fucking blown it?

Once you get there, you’re at the dance.

But you left your dancing shoes.

And you blow it because you’re not ready.

You are not ready.

Just like this stage in your trading.

You’ll be content in the beginning with five handles, 10 handles, or 20 handles consistently.

Then that wild hair gets up your ass, like it does with everybody.

It happens to every one of us.

And you want to be a big leaguer.

You want to go for that big grand slam.

Yes, you can do it.

Yes, you can be Babe Ruth.

But you can’t be Babe Ruth every fucking day.

You can’t.

It’s Murphy’s Law.

You know, it’s the human element you’re bringing into this, which is what everybody does.

I, as ICT, do that too.

Sometimes I get out sooner than I want.

Sometimes I don’t take enough off where I should have.

It just happens.

You overthink it.

You try to finesse it.

It is what it is.

Rules are there to guide you.

So the rule for you to be able to do this is to start with one contract.

When you get funded, I don’t give a shit what company it is or who’s doing what.

I don’t give a flying fuck who is doing what.

Do not try to emulate anyone.

And I’m at the top of the fucking list.

Don’t try to emulate me.

Because you don’t know where your sweet spot is.

What does that mean?

You see me doing what I do with pyramiding.

I’ll go in and take six contracts as my first initial entry.

Then my second partial pyramid into a larger position will be three contracts.

And then my third will be one contract.

So what I’m doing is scaling in, but I’m really showing traders how to make three entries and not need to have the best one.

There isn’t just one entry.

There are lots of entries.

But I’m showing you how to scale into a trade with 10 contracts.

That’s my comfort zone right now, based on the volatility in the marketplace and how it’s been behaving.

It’s been higher than that.

It’s been lower than that, depending on how fast the market is moving.

That doesn’t mean that’s what you should be doing.

Your comfort level might end up being just three contracts.

And that’s nothing to be concerned about or ashamed of.

Don’t think of it like it’s a dick-measuring contest, okay?

That’s why women are better than fucking men when it comes to trading.

They’re not out there trying to scale up and say, “Look, my cock’s larger than yours. I’m trading with 30 contracts, bitch. What’s up?”

That’s not how it works.

Because really, you can put on that 30-contract trade, but the whole time you’re shitting bricks.

They don’t see you.

They don’t see your face.

They don’t see you shitting yourself or your palms sweating the whole time.

You’re thinking, “Man, if this blows up, I’m going to be so embarrassed. I’m never going to share this result. I’ll just say I really didn’t trade that day.”

You only know what people show you.

So don’t try to emulate anybody.

Start with one contract.

Then work up to two.

Then work up to three.

And if you feel uncomfortable, go back down.

Not one contract down.

Go all the way back to one and graduate back up again.

Then see if that same thing happens when you go back to three contracts.

When you want to start hitting these grand-slam home runs, you don’t go into it with one or two contracts, then five contracts, eight contracts, or 15 contracts.

And now, “I want to do 15 contracts and try to catch a 100-handle run.”

That doesn’t work.

Because it’s too big of a leap forward.

You haven’t conditioned yourself to find out whether that’s even realistic leverage for you.

You are the trader.

You can’t emulate someone else and find comfort by pressing yourself into the mold and image of somebody else doing it.

Me or anyone else.

So, number one, you have to know where the higher-timeframe draw on liquidity is.

That means there has to be room for these big runs.

It may not be 100 handles you’re reaching for.

It may be 30.

It may be 50.

But those only exist within the realm of possibility based on what the market structure is showing right now.

And what has it done?

Is there an impact news driver coming out, or are those events already behind you?

Are you later in the week?

Like today, we had a big gap down, a really large Opening Range Gap.

And sometimes it’s not reasonable to go short when it’s like that.

I went short today.

And I was going for it.

I went into both markets just to show you that you can read this in real time.

And if it doesn’t go down there, I’ll see it.

You watched it happen.

I took a partial almost at the low in Nasdaq.

Then I took 50% of the remaining position off before it came back and knocked out my stop, which was still in profit.

That’s more than 70 handles on that move.

Is that a runner for you?

I mean, I got in pretty high, near the Opening Range Gap high, and held it almost to the low of the morning.

Then it crept back up to about 50% of the Opening Range Gap.

So you have to look at where we stopped trading yesterday and where we started trading this morning at 9:30.

I’m sorry—where we settled yesterday afternoon and where we opened at 9:30 today.

That’s your Opening Range Gap.

Measure that and mark its 50% level.

You’ll see that both ES and Nasdaq essentially went back up to that level, with a little bit more.

But during the early session, until we got into the lunch hour, it was consolidating sideways.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

I watch YouTubers all the time, and you could hear the frustration in their voices.

You could see it in the ones who show their faces.

And that’s normal.

But if it doesn’t want to go down to those fair value gaps that we outlined on the daily charts in the tweet I shared this morning, then it will respect the Opening Range Gap and try to work into it.

But after being down so much from the opening, it’s not likely to go all the way up there and completely fill the Opening Range Gap when it’s already that close to the daily fair value gaps.

That’s not likely.

So if that’s not likely, what is reasonable?

ES and Nasdaq went up throughout lunch.

And what do I teach you about time of day?

Because these are the other things you have to factor in.

When do these characteristics manifest in price?

Because everything is governed by time and price.

Not price first, and then hoping it’s the right time to buy or sell.

No.

We wait for a specific time of day.

After lunch, we know that the algorithm begins its PM session at 1:30 New York local time.

Around 1:40 or so—I can’t remember the exact minute marker—but around 1:40, we had a high form in both ES and Nasdaq.

Nasdaq was unwilling to make that higher high when it was approximately 80% into the Opening Range Gap.

So there’s a divergence there.

What did I tell you I favored today?

The daily-chart fair value gap.

That’s the draw.

Now think for a second.

Just think for a second.

If you want the lion’s portion of the move, that means the market crept up after failing to run into those daily fair value gaps during the morning session.

I was able to take a big chunk of that move out.

Then it went up into half of the Opening Range Gap.

And at 1:30, the PM session begins its rotation.

The market starts reaching for what?

That higher-timeframe draw on liquidity.

ES reaches down into it.

What time did it get there?

Three o’clock on the dot.

Nasdaq didn’t do it.

It didn’t trade as low as ES did.

Why?

Because you have to understand intermarket relationships in your trading.

If you really want to be a grand-slam home-run trader and hold these big runners, you have to do the research and determine which market you’re in.

Are you in the right one?

Are you in the one most likely to give you the downside?

Which one is more bearish?

Which one is more likely to go lower?

The one that failed to go higher while the markets were advancing.

It’s the laggard.

And the one that was stronger while the markets were going up is going to be more reluctant to go down when it’s time to sell off.

So if you have a higher-timeframe draw on liquidity, you’re balancing that against what the markets are doing at the time.

And I showed this to you this morning by being short both markets at the same time.

When there are warning signs that one is not cooperating with you and your trade idea, kill it.

I’m not afraid of being wrong.

What mentor out there is able to do that?

Show you the execution and explain, “This is what I was looking for.”

Then it doesn’t do exactly what I wanted it to do, but guess what?

I’m still able to show profitability.

That’s what you want to start with.

You want to be able to do that.

That’s a stage in your development.

When you watch me or other people hold these big runs, you think it’s something you should be able to do right off the bat.

Right off the bat.

You watched a couple of videos.

You listened to me jawbone, or someone else.

You joined some subscription-based service.

And you think you’re just going to walk out there and do it too.

It’s hard.

It’s very, very hard to do that consistently.

I’ve never met anybody—and I know a lot of people who are traders, who have tried trading, and who have been trading longer than me—and none of these motherfuckers have ever done what you’re thinking you’re going to be able to do.

And I’ve already said this:

If anybody was going to be able to walk out there and do it immediately, it would have been ICT.

And I couldn’t do that.

It took time.

It took working through a lot of shit.

Graduating through:

Can I trade with two contracts?

Can I trade with five contracts?

Can I trade with 25 contracts?

Can I trade with 50 contracts?

Can I trade 100 contracts?

All of these are thresholds you have to grow into.

You have no idea what it feels like to have $3,500 per handle of movement.

Four ticks—$3,500.

Can you just walk out into the market and do that because you mastered the 2022 Mentorship playlist, because you condensed it into 15 fucking videos?

Come on.

These are unrealistic expectations, and you’re trying to perform unrealistic feats.

And then you think what you’re learning from me is complicated.

No.

What you’re trying to do with it is the complication.

These big runners and big moves in the marketplace happen over time.

So you have to know the higher-timeframe draw on liquidity.

Where is it likely to go?

You also have to understand intermarket relationships if you’re going to be an index trader.

Whether you trade the Dow, which I don’t, whether you trade ES, or whether you prefer Nasdaq because it’s faster and thinner.

That’s why every move in Nasdaq is much more exaggerated.

And that wild-ass movement is an enticement.

But you might get into index trading because of what I’ve been teaching, or because of someone else doing it.

Then you get into Nasdaq and it kicks your ass.

That doesn’t mean quit.

It just means, okay, go trade ES.

You can make a fuckload of money trading ES.

You don’t need to trade Nasdaq.

I do it because there are pony boys out there who think they understand that market.

They think it can do this and do that.

And I go out there, grab it by the throat, and strangle it in front of you.

You see it happening.

You watch me execute it and manage it.

But you also see me doing more than 20 handles.

You also see me doing more than five handles.

And I’m showing you how to manage and grow into that.

I can go through and do full pulls—enter at the high and get out at the low.

I can do that.

And I’m going to fucking do it.

But you’re trying to learn.

So how do you graduate into that?

You go in and determine where price is likely to go.

Then, during the process of getting there, where can I take partials off?

That way, it rewards me and gives me more courage to hold on.

Because if it returns against me and goes for my stop-loss, which I may have trailed too quickly or too aggressively, at least I’ve been paid.

And it’s soothing to have that experience while you’re developing.

All of my consistently profitable students aren’t even listening to me anymore because they’re doing their own thing.

All of my students who have reached that point aren’t taking partials the way they did when they first started.

They don’t need to.

They’ve found their model.

They know what they’re looking for.

They know what their setups look like.

They’re managing them properly and just letting them go.

And they’re not trading every day.

And they’re fucking killing it.

You think trading is this one particular thing.

But for you, it might be something entirely different.

And that might be perfect for you.

You might want to hit these grand-slam home runs.

But you know what?

You might discover that you’re a perfect 30-handle trader.

Stop.

Get out of the trade.

Be done.

Look for your next setup.

And that’s where you’re highly efficient as a trader.

You’re managing your money properly.

You’re managing your mental capital properly.

And you’re not marrying these ideas.

You’re not going to be enticed to try to do a little bit more because Nasdaq bats its eyes at you and sweet-talks you.

You’re not trying to take it home to meet your mother.

You’re just trying to have fun with it.

A romp.

That’s it.

There’s no shame in it.

Get your shit, get your honey, and get the fuck out of Dodge.

That’s all this is about.

There’s no shame in that.

There’s nothing anti-Christian about going out here and making a lot of fucking money trading.

You’re not stealing from people.

The people you took it from knew exactly what was going on.

Everybody walks in with their hands out of their pockets, with money sticking out there, saying, “Take it from me if you can.”

That’s what this business is about.

But if you go out here and constantly look around, trying to do something you’re not prepared for, you’re going to fail.

And that little, tiny failure is going to have such a huge impact.

It’s going to derail you.

You’ll forget that you can consistently find five handles.

You’ll forget that you can find three good trades out of the week and know when not to trade on the bad days.

And that’s good.

You’re going to beat yourself up because you tried to do something—an Olympic feat—that you’re not quite ready for.

But that doesn’t mean you’re not going to get there.

It just means you’re trying to do too much, too soon.

So you don’t go in trying to trade with big positions to catch these long runners.

You do it with small positions.

And over time, you graduate by adding one more contract, or one more lot if it’s Forex.

You condition yourself over time.

How much time is it going to take?

I don’t know.

It depends on what you’re trying to do.

But I don’t want you thinking that you need a timeline or a deadline.

“I have to be able to catch these 100-pip or 100-handle runs by the end of this month, because if I don’t, I’m a failure.”

That’s not reasonable.

That’s not even practical.

Every person who has set foot in this industry and made themselves something of a success—I promise you, if they sat down with you, spoke openly, and were honest about what they didn’t have and how they got to where they are—the biggest growth in their understanding and ability as a trader came when they slowed the fuck down and stopped trying to do more than was necessary.

If you can make $25,000 a month with one contract—and that’s exactly what I was doing at TD Ameritrade—that’s enough.

I was literally talking to one of the young ladies in my mentorship who was struggling.

She said, “Look, I can get in here, use the concepts, and make money. But when I try to trade with more position size, I start losing. I don’t blow the account. I just go right back down to breakeven.”

“And yes, I scale down. I start back at square one, and I go with one contract because I’m a futures trader.”

“I’m trying to build it up, build it up, and I get it there. Then I go right back down to breakeven.”

“Then I rush it, try to get back what I lost, get into deep drawdown, and then I don’t know what to do.”

So I purposely put that account into drawdown.

And I went through the entire process with real money.

Not because I was fucking obligated to any of you.

But I wanted this young lady to do well.

She asked me sincerely.

That was why I did it.

It was just for her.

But that one contract made $25,000 in one month—five weeks—while correcting drawdown.

It was put in place to show her, day by day:

“Look, this is what you do.”

“This is what you don’t do.”

“This is what happens if you do this.”

She paid me, so I was obligated to her.

I’m not obligated to any of you motherfuckers.

Okay, I don’t mean that disrespectfully.

But seriously, some of you act like you fucking own me.

You don’t own me.

I promise you, you’ll never be able to hold on to these big runners because you have too much mental baggage.

So you have to make sure you clear all of that out before you try to do these types of things.

If you’re trying to measure yourself against somebody else, trying to be better than another person’s service, or trying to create a product that’s better than somebody else’s, all of those things are going to lead you to do things you’re not really equipped to do.

You just want to take a chance, see if you can do it, and then sell the idea that you do it all the time.

What is your threshold as a trader?

Where are you going to be most efficient?

Consider the limitations on your time and how much time you can put into the charts.

Graduating into holding on to a big runner—you’re years away from entering with your full position and holding on for those kinds of moves.

I’m being honest with you.

You are fucking years away.

A thousand fucking market days, minimum.

If you started today and counted today as day one, you’re at least 1,000 market days away.

I’m not counting weekends.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get in with one contract next week and take 100 handles out of a move.

Yeah, sure, you can do that.

That’s reasonable.

But when you start building these larger positions, whether it’s in a funded-account challenge, after being funded by a company, or while trading with your own money, those things are going to weigh heavily on your psyche.

You’re going to be constantly worrying:

“Did I do this right?”

And you’re going to know that you did it too soon.

I guaran-damn-tee that’s going to happen.

You’re going to feel it.

And it’s going to cloud your mind.

You won’t even be able to recognize when the market is telling you, “I’m not going to do that.”

But you want it to deliver into your hands so badly that you won’t see it.

You will not see it.

And you’ll hold on too long.

Then the worst-case scenario—the very thing you’re trying to avoid—will actually happen.

It will come back and roll against you.

And those nice, big, handsome unrealized profits you had—the ones you knew you should have fucking taken, at least partially—you didn’t take them.

So now what are you doing?

You’re kicking yourself in the ass over it.

You’re not ready.

That doesn’t mean you’re never going to get there.

It just means you haven’t desensitized yourself yet.

You work up to it slowly.

Now, partials—and I’ll say this in closing—are a huge benefit to developing students.

Number one, they teach proper money management and proper trade management.

They help you grow as a trader.

They help you understand risk.

They help you navigate order flow.

They teach you liquidity and how to implement it in your trades.

But the thing is, there’s no perfect formula.

I don’t have one.

There’s no perfect way of saying, “Okay, this is how many contracts you should start with, and when you get to your first target, this is how many you should take off as your first partial.”

But there is no—and I’m telling you openly—there is no recipe that’s going to be appropriate for everyone.

That’s the part you bring into it.

That’s your personality.

So you start with one contract.

That means when you get to the first threshold of profitability for a partial—which, if you had more than one contract, or more than one lot if it’s a Forex position, would be where you take something off—the way you condition yourself to grow as a trader is this:

When it gets to that first threshold, you close the trade.

“Wait a minute. Your target is somewhere beyond that. You just told me to get out where the first partial would be.”

Yes.

If you haven’t found consistency yet, that’s what I teach my students to do.

And then you do that repeatedly using lower-timeframe charts, because you’re going to get lots of setups that way.

You can do it a lot over the course of one month.

If you’re trying to do those kinds of trades on a 4-hour chart, it’s going to take a long fucking time.

And I don’t have that kind of patience.

You might think I have the patience of a saint, but I don’t.

You don’t either once you start messing around with this.

So you graduate.

And when you get to the point where you can hold that first idea with one contract to the first partial, then you can trade two contracts—or two lots as a Forex trader.

Then you take one off at the first partial and hold the second for the next partial.

Then you close that one there too, still without reaching your final target.

What is that teaching you?

You don’t have to be right.

What is it teaching you?

Pay yourself.

What else is it teaching you?

Hold for two stages of liquidity.

Then, when you can trade three contracts, you take one off at the first partial, the second off at the second partial, and you roll your stop to a point where you’re comfortable being stopped out.

What is that level?

It might be breakeven.

For others, it might be $200.

It might be some specific dollar amount.

Whatever it is, it should be the minimum result where, if you’re knocked out of the trade, you don’t care.

It’s not going to hurt your feelings.

You’re not going to beat yourself up over it.

But can you understand how many people listen to me all around the world?

There are a lot of you.

You’re all coming from different walks of life, with different incomes and different careers.

Some of you have very stressful lives.

Some of you just got out of fucking prison.

Think about it.

There are all kinds of walks of life represented in this community.

And I don’t have one specific recipe for telling all of you how much to take off in partials.

But in the beginning, it starts with one.

When you reach the first target where a partial would normally be taken, you get out.

And you keep doing that.

And it feels good because then you get to watch and see, “Does it really go to my final target?”

And when you journal that, it gives you experience.

Now apply that to holding these big runners.

That’s all you’re doing.

But what you’re trying to do is skip over a lot of necessary conditioning.

If you’re trading, if you’re pushing the button, the result should be that you’re making money.

That’s it.

Larry Williams said that if you ever get this impulse while you’re in a trade and you pull out the calculator, thinking:

“If I hold on this much longer, and if I don’t take much off the position—if I hold on to everything—I’m going to make this much money.”

As soon as you start changing your mind about what you think it’s likely to do or how far it’s going to go beyond what you originally expected, that’s a warning.

For me, if I feel any kind of vibration because of my experience—but especially as soon as you say out loud, “I don’t know if I should”—that’s it.

Close the fucking trade.

You’re managing your money.

You’re managing the risk.

You’re managing the trade.

You’re in this to make money.

You grow from a starting point that’s rather modest, and then gradually, over time, you add a little bit more and a little bit more.

And you may discover that you won’t become a 100-handle trader.

But you can beat the fucking socks off 30- and 40-handle runs.

And you can find them all week long—up, down, sideways, everywhere.

But 100 handles might not be your thing.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to reach for it.

But you can’t do it with a 1-minute chart or a 3-minute chart.

You have to have a higher-timeframe perspective.

You have to have something beyond the interval.

The lay of the land has to be larger than what you’re looking at when it’s a small, tiny interval.

If you don’t have that frame—and I’ve talked about this in whatever the last livestream was; I can’t even remember what it was called—I showed how I was trading something using the run on lunchtime liquidity, then running up into the high of the day, and pyramiding all the way through it.

But I was also showing you that there were reference points from higher-timeframe charts.

When you’re catching these big runners, you didn’t step into that overnight.

You have to graduate into it gradually over time, working slowly toward that goal.

And again, it may take you much longer to get there.

But now you know how to get there.

The fastest way is to keep stretching the boundaries of your comfort zone.

When you feel that discomfort, those are growing pains.

Are you doing that last repetition to failure?

Stop.

Don’t go any further.

You’re not going to get any more muscle growth.

Stop right there.

Then watch and see what happens.

Does it run to the objective where you thought it was going to go?

Or does it turn back on you?

Then measure that in your journal.

Say, “This is what I did that day. This is how much I got. This is the exact moment when I felt uncomfortable. I closed here.”

Then record what you took away from that as positive reinforcement.

And each time you do that, just like weight training, you’ll be able to add another two-pound plate, five-pound plate, or 10-pound plate.

One more repetition.

One more set.

And you’ll go beyond that and grow.

When you first start trading, you may want to be a 100-handle-run type of trader.

But you may discover that you can’t hold on to a position that long because your patience threshold doesn’t support that type of trading.

You may need to be a hit-and-run type of trader.

Five handles.

Ten handles.

Maybe 10, 15, or 20 pips if it’s a Forex trade.

Then you’re done.

You’re completely out of the marketplace, and you can relax because you’re wound up like a top and constantly stressed out.

Okay, you can grow out of that.

But until you do, you have to be comfortable with what you’re doing.

You have to be comfortable in your own skin.

Over time, you’re going to take less off at your first partial and leave more on for the terminal objective—where you think price is ultimately going to go.

You’ll reserve the larger portion for that.

Then, over time, you’ll reach the point where you know where your first partial would have been in the past, but because you now feel confident in what you’re doing, you’ll take your first partial where your second or third partial would have been.

And it’ll be very small—just a little token, paying homage to how far you’ve come as a trader.

When you reach the point where you’ve mastered your own model—and this is the key point—you’ve mastered yourself, then you can start doing full pulls.

The only time you take a partial is like what you saw me do in Nasdaq today, where I got that vibration saying, “Okay, it’s going to run back on my stop. Let me kill half the position.”

Because if I’m wrong about that, at least I still have half of the position on after the first partial was taken.

Then, if it rolls down and reaches my objective, I’m okay with that.

I managed the trade properly either way.

I reduced the load in terms of risk, and I’m satisfied with the outcome.

That’s the sweet spot.

But you don’t know what that is for you.

You don’t know what it is.

All of you listening—you don’t know what that is until you discover it on your own.

And that takes time.

It takes the initiative to go through the process and expose yourself to the discomfort of not knowing:

“Do I hold?”

“Do I close?”

And the easiest way to move through that stage of growth is to say:

“Okay, I’m at this point where I have $6,000 in open profit.”

“I have $4,000 in open profit.”

“I want to see it go farther, but I’m afraid it’ll roll back against me.”

“And I’m afraid that if I close it, it’ll run to my target.”

So what do you do?

Take half off.

Take half off and be content with whatever happens after that.

That’s how you do it.

That’s how you condition yourself to catch these big runners.

That’s how I was able to do it.

Nothing happened because of the books I bought.

Nothing happened from listening to lectures by people who did this or did that.

The things I heard from Larry Williams—the person who took $10,000 and turned it into $1.2 million—it wasn’t because of everything he did.

All of his discussions didn’t help me.

They created more puzzles.

Just like I’m sure that when I teach what I teach, it creates a plethora of new, seemingly unanswerable questions.

But those questions get answered over time.

You’re expecting all of them to be within your understanding right away.

And some of you think that catching big runners should automatically come with the fact that you can now trade and find profitability.

“I need to be able to do that.”

No, you don’t.

You don’t need that.

And you shouldn’t speak in terms of, “I need.”

“I need” places so much unnecessary pressure on your performance, which by default results in performance anxiety.

These things are so critical for people to master within themselves.

And you don’t know what the triggering events are going to be in your trading.

You don’t know what they are.

I can’t tell you what they’re going to be.

But I can tell you when they’re likely to creep in, and I can give you coping mechanisms to graduate through them.

And journaling is the biggest thing.

That’s the biggest crutch you have as a trader.

You have to have it, folks.

You have to.

Nobody is going to cheerlead you when you’re going through drawdown.

They’re not going to do it.

Not sufficiently.

So you have to do it yourself.

How can you encourage yourself?

Go back through your journal and find a period when you were hitting it.

You were firing on all cylinders.

Everything you touched turned to gold.

It was fucking phenomenal trading.

You were dialed in.

Read what you annotated on the charts.

Look at the trades you took, the executions, where you entered, where you exited, the profits—all that shit.

That’s where you want to get high off that.

You want to take in that shit, okay?

Because you’re going to need it when you mess up.

You’re going to need it when you go through a period of drawdown.

Or when you go through something like we had in April, when I knew the market was in some kind of funk.

If I had come out here, it would not have been typical ICT.

So I practiced what I preach to you.

If you don’t feel like you’re aligned with the marketplace, take a step away.

I got in a fucking RV and went down the road.

Are you willing to do that?

Chances are, you probably aren’t.

You think it’s everyday trading, baby.

“It’s everyday trading.”

“The markets are open every day.”

“Every day is a casino.”

That’s bullshit.

If you’re learning how to trade and you haven’t found your model, and you haven’t gone through the growth required to discover who you are and how you’re going to fuck everything up, everyday trading is not something you should aspire to.

You should not be trying to do that.

If you’re brand new, you don’t know yourself.

You don’t know your model.

If you’re not consistent, hell fucking no.

No way.

You’re guaranteeing failure.

You’re inviting it in and promising it that it’s going to be successful in its endeavor.

Trade less.

Choose quality setups, opportunities, and market environments while you’re learning.

Then you’ll never fear missing anything.

You’ll become more confident trading in the environments that can produce those big runners.

The things I openly share and talk about on Twitter—when I point to something and say, “Okay, mark this”—I’m rarely wrong about those things.

When I share them, it’s because everything I would trust within myself—who I am, what I codified and created, and all this bullshit—is behind that idea.

I feel confident that there’s an opportunity there.

And I know people are going to take that information and put money behind it, which is not what I’m inviting you to do.

But when I know I have everything in my repertoire behind me and I feel confident enough to share it, that’s when I do it.

Because I know it’s going to be abused.

You’ll overleverage your shit.

And if you’re overleveraged and I’m not 100% confident, you’re going to tweet me and say:

“I fucking did that, and it didn’t work out.”

Then you’re going to tell me I’m an asshole from your sock-puppet account.

That’s going to grieve me.

And even if no one said they lost money and it didn’t pan out, it would still grieve me.

Because I know some of you would be sitting there in quiet silence, full of regret, with your head hanging over something I may have inspired.

That’s why I don’t do it as frequently as you probably want me to.

But I toss my hat into the ring once in a while just to remind you who I am and keep you encouraged.

So hopefully, this has been somewhat helpful to you.

It probably hasn’t scratched the itch for some of you.

And some of you probably feel like I wasted your time.

That’s fine.

Nobody paid anything to come here.

And I’m not holding anyone hostage.

So take what I gave tonight as heartfelt encouragement and, obviously, advice that I believe is beneficial because I went through this stuff.

I went through it.

And I had to go through it with a lot of failures.

I lost a lot of money in real accounts trying to do it other ways.

I listened to shit that didn’t make sense and didn’t work.

And I stripped it down to this:

I have to treat it like any other process.

Slow and methodical.

Slow and methodical wins every fucking time.

Just like a partial pays every time.

A partial profit never fails to pay you.

A sound approach will always yield experience.

And that experience will always be profitable, even if you experience an adverse result over a short-term, measurable period.

That same adverse reaction or result—where you tried something and expected a positive response or outcome—can be used as a measuring stick.

Because the next time you do it, it probably won’t be as bad.

It’ll be a little better, if it happens at all.

So you have to enter this industry with the expectation that you’re going to have failures.

You’re going to have setbacks.

You’re going to have a much longer learning curve than you ever expected.

Because listening to a mentor, whether it’s me or someone else, does not guarantee your success.

It does not guarantee it.

Nobody can guarantee that.

No one can guarantee that you’re going to catch these big runners.

But there is a proper way to do it.

And I covered it tonight.

There’s no sugarcoating it.

There’s no faster way around it.

You simply have to go through it.

Because every single one of you listening, just like me, carries mental baggage.

I have mental illness that I have to wrestle with every single day.

And it’s not easy.

Maybe you don’t have that in your existence in this world.

I do.

But you probably have something else.

Maybe you have a spouse who is a nagging, unsupportive person.

And every time you’re looking at the charts, they’re over your shoulder saying:

“What the fuck are you doing that for?”

“Why are you wasting your time?”

“You’ve been doing this shit for three months. Have you made any money yet?”

I’m not telling you to be a terrible member of that relationship.

But I would suggest that if that’s your situation, find a way to do this away from them.

And I’m not saying divorce them.

Find a way to do it where they aren’t able to place that energy over you.

Because it will steal your joy.

It will replace your passion.

And it will rob you of the opportunity to politely show them that they were fucking wrong.

They were fucking wrong.

Remember, this is your pursuit.

And if you’re married, you have to give them the fruits required to believe in it.

But don’t let them choke your fucking roots before you start growing that fruit.

Don’t give any opportunity to Satan, the enemy, or the fucking thing that creeps in and spoils the vine.

Don’t give any opportunity to that.

You have to guard your mind.

Guard your time.

Keep the bullshit out of it.

That may mean toxic people.

It may mean members of your friendship circle.

Co-workers.

Your very own spouse.

Don’t let them do it.

That doesn’t mean you mistreat them or act ignorantly toward them.

Just don’t make your work available for them to critique.

Put the work in.

And when you get there, then you can decide how you reveal it to them.

And you’ll have fun doing this.

Don’t be an arrogant prick about it.

Because I did that, and it doesn’t work well.

You don’t make friends.

And you don’t influence people in the right way.

People will pretend to care about your opinion, even regarding things you don’t know anything about.

But it’s really fake friendship.

It’s fake.

It’s fake adoration.

They just want to get something from you or have you do something for them.

And when you don’t do it, or they feel like they’ve hit a wall in their relationship with you, they won’t be interested in you anymore.

Then you’ll be the dick.

You’ll be the arrogant asshole.

Blah, blah, blah.

And that’s exactly what happened.

“Let me borrow money.”

A lot of success allows you to do this and that.

But it’s not the same as being someone who is genuine and down to earth.

You’re not out there trying to rub what you have in everybody’s face.

You’re not talking down to people because you have more than they have.

Those are all the wrong reasons to be doing this.

And some of you young guys already know that’s exactly what you want to do.

I hope you don’t do those things.

Because you might get attention.

You might get a following from all that stuff.

But you’re going to have a whole lot of people who won’t respect you.

They won’t have any consideration for what you’re doing because they’re going to see it for what it is.

It’s just clout.

You might be successful.

You might make a lot of money.

But people don’t really give a fuck because they can’t spend your money.

They can’t drive your cars.

They can’t sleep in your houses.

They can’t swim in your heated pools.

They can’t go to your vacation homes.

So none of that really matters.

And if you’re inspired by all that stuff, once you get it—and listen to me—once you have all that stuff, it’s not going to be what you imagined.

I had much higher expectations before I actually got it.

I thought I would have this feeling.

I thought I would have that experience.

It’s not like you think it is.

It’s nice to have it.

But once the novelty wears off and everyone you know has seen that you have it, that’s it.

They aren’t calling you up asking:

“Hey, do you still have that sports car in the garage?”

“Do you still go to that place you own?”

“Do you still have this over here?”

“Do you still do that?”

Nobody gives a fuck.

But right now, when you don’t have it, you think that’s what life is like for everyone who does.

It isn’t.

It’s not like that.

It’s just stuff.

You need to enjoy being successful for the sake of being successful and being free.

Do it so you never have to work with fucking Karl again.

You can leave.

You can tell your boss, “You’re fucking fired.”

Become unemployable.

That’s why you do this.

No other reason.

Not for clout.

Not for people to kiss your ass in public.

Simply to be free from all the bullshit.

You want fuck-you money.

This is the kind of stuff you would want someone who has gone through it to tell you.

I’ve had the good, and I’ve had the bad.

And some of the things you young guys think you want—I wanted that stuff too.

Once you obtain it, it’s not as important as being present in the moment with your loved ones and your friends.

Think about how many times you’re posing, trying to be more than you really are.

I did that shit all the time when I was 20 years old.

All the time.

I’d have $2,000 or $3,000 knotted up in my pocket.

Any opportunity to pull that fucker out—going into 7-Eleven to grab something to drink—the whole fucking wad had to come out because I wanted somebody to see it.

That reminded me, “Yeah, I’ve arrived now.”

How fucking stupid was that?

I would never do that today.

I’d have fucking bats upside my head, be laid the fuck out, and wake up right where I stood.

Then my eyes would open like, “Damn, he was stupid as fuck carrying that knot of money around.”

But that’s the dumb shit people do when they’re young.

You do dumb shit.

And rushing to catch these big runners before you’re properly equipped mentally, before you have the model and the experience to do it consistently—you don’t want to do it just one time and say, “Yeah, I did it.”

You want to be able to do it consistently, a couple of times a month.

That takes time.

And time is what many of you don’t want to spend.

You’re in a hurry to get there and blow accounts.

“I don’t have time to be learning this shit.”

“You talk too much, ICT.”

“Let me get out here, put money into an account, buy some funded-account challenges, and fucking shit myself when I blow them again.”

Then you go out, try to make some more money over the next two weeks, and buy some more challenges.

Which one makes more sense?

Because that doesn’t sound like it makes sense to me.

It sounds like a waste of fucking time and money.

So you’re doing two things incorrectly.

You’re wasting your time by rushing to do something you’re not equipped to do, instead of taking your time, slowing the fuck down, and enjoying the process.

Because this is a career.

It’s not a hobby.

Some of you think it’s like a scratch-off ticket.

You get into a funded account and think, “Yeah, I’m going to get in here and make five figures.”

What happens if you get lucky and do it one time, and it was just happenstance that got you there?

You’re going to know damn well.

Listen to the people who are honest and represent funded-account companies.

They’ll tell you they know which people are going to receive payouts consistently and which ones just got lucky.

They know.

Are you going to be the person who gets a payout the first time while knowing in your heart that it probably won’t happen again?

I don’t want to hear that.

I don’t want to see that in any of you.

I want to see you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re going to take money from these funded accounts and then fund yourself.

Oops.

Don’t have all of your expected future revenue tied up in a company like that.

They may be obtainable right now, but nothing is guaranteed.

Nothing is guaranteed.

But if you take the money you earn from that and put it into something that makes you money—something that generates residual income—I’m not suggesting what that might be because there are lots of things you can do.

But at the very minimum, you should eventually have a real funded account in your own name with a real broker.

A real broker where you can take out all the fucking money.

You can take out 50% or more, and they’re not going to say no.

If you make $1,000 or $10,000 in one day, as long as you have time to deal with the domestic wire wherever you are, they can send that shit out to you that day.

Not, “You have to be profitable for five more business days.”

I get it.

They all have rules.

They have a business model they have to adhere to.

But at some point, you’re going to have to leave that or at least branch out into using a real brokerage.

I don’t represent any brokers.

I don’t represent any funded-account firms.

I’m not an introducing broker.

I don’t go there.

But you need to be with a reputable broker.

Once you start becoming profitable, you need to take your money and put it into a real brokerage firm.

And the rules you adhered to that got you to that point—apply that same funded-account approach to your real money.

But use even stricter adherence to the rules.

Many of you don’t like hearing that.

But listen to the guys who are making big money.

“ICT student does this.”

“ICT student does that.”

$100,000.

$180,000.

$500,000.

Now listen to what they’re risking.

Less than 1%.

Yeah.

They listened.

They listened to those presentations where everybody said, “ICT is talking about 1% risk, but you can’t get rich doing that.”

Did you make half a million dollars this year?

Did you make $180,000 this year?

I think these cats are doing it.

They’re using what they learned.

They’re creating and blazing their own trail.

I’m not giving them setups.

They’re finding them themselves.

They’re not pushing the risk.

They’re getting paid out, and they’re being interviewed by the companies that paid them.

Where’s the fraud?

Where’s the fucking fakery in that?

They’re doing everything on their own.

And I have so much respect for them.

I’m proud of them.

I have many students who do more than that and stay quiet.

They don’t want any kind of fucking notoriety.

And I’m proud of them too.

I’m more proud of them because they know why they got into this.

They stay in their own lane.

They don’t give a shit about proving anything to anyone else.

They’re not working anymore.

You don’t need to convince them that they made the right decision.

Believe me, they wake up every day saying, “I did the right thing.”

And that’s what you need to do.

You need to become comfortable in your own skin and grow as a trader.

Whether that means trying to catch big runners, simply finding consistency, deciding which asset class to trade, or figuring out which model to use.

There are so many things you’re wrestling with.

You may not feel like you are, but you are.

All of these things are going to have an impact.

They’re either going to derail you, prolong your learning curve, or force you to figure out what you need to do to grow through them.

Because some of these things, you’re going to have to experience.

There’s no way around them.

Just like your first losing trade or getting it wrong the first time.

You don’t want to have that experience, but you might as well do it quickly.

Just do it.

Get it over with.

That’s why I tell everyone, as soon as you get a live account, flip a quarter and take the first trade based on a whim.

Get that first loss out of the way.

Let the first loss come that way.

It’s done.

The ice is broken.

Now there’s nothing left to fear.

Because you’ll sit there hemming and hawing, worrying:

“It’s my first real trade, man.”

It’s like performance anxiety.

“What if she doesn’t think I measure up?”

That’s the kind of shit a guy does when he looks at his account.

They make it sexual.

They want to make sure the market talks about them to its girlfriends tomorrow.

No.

You’re going in there to have a romp.

That’s it.

That’s it.

You have a stop-loss.

That’s your fucking protection.

There are no sexually transmitted diseases.

STD is standard deviation.

That’s the closest thing to an STD that’s ever going to be in your trade.

So don’t worry about this shit.

You’re not taking it home to meet your mother.

Go in.

Have a one-night stand.

Have a romp.

That’s it.

It’s done.

Your stop-loss is your protection.

Your target is your orgasm.

There it is.

Simple as that.

Be thankful.

Happy ending.

Next.

It doesn’t make you a player.

It doesn’t make you a dog.

It doesn’t make you less of a gentleman.

It just means you’re a trader.

You’re going in there and taking what’s yours.

That’s it.

And sometimes you’re going to get turned down.

It happens, guys.

It happens, ladies.

You might think that trade is something you can take home, and it says, “Not tonight.”

Then you go home.

That’s it.

You’re by yourself.

You don’t take any profits.

You went into the club, spent some money, bought some drinks, and nothing happened.

You lost.

That’s drawdown.

Get over it.

But guess what happens the next fucking weekend?

You have more money in your pocket.

You’re going back to that same fucking club.

You’re doing the same fucking thing.

That’s your model.

So why are you looking at trading any differently?

You go out there.

You invest the money.

You buy some drinks.

You want to have a good time.

And the market says, “Not tonight. Thanks for buying the drinks, though.”

Then you go back for the next trading opportunity at the club.

It’s a process.

That’s all it is.

It’s a process.

How you think about it and what you turn into a deterrent, boundary, or barrier in your mind—you’re doing that to yourself.

It’s just numbers.

The market is going up, going down, or going sideways.

That’s it.

That’s all that’s happening.

But you don’t realize what you’re doing internally that’s preventing you from holding these big runners.

What are you scaring yourself with?

What are you concerning yourself with?

What distractions are becoming impediments to you taking these types of trades?

Do you know how you discover what they are?

Journaling.

Journaling.

There’s nothing wrong with recording your concerns and saying:

“I noticed today that while I was in the market, at this point and at this time, the market had done this or that, and I was concerned.”

Don’t write, “I was scared.”

Don’t write, “I was anxious.”

No.

Write, “I was concerned about this.”

Whatever it was that distracted you.

Whatever it was that you were worrying about.

But you’re not calling it worry or fear.

You’re saying you were concerned.

Concern is like when you go to a doctor.

If something is wrong with you, you want them to show concern.

But they’re not going to walk in, look at your chart, and say:

“Fuck, dude, you’re not going to believe this.”

“You have six days.”

“Maybe five days at most, man.”

“What the fuck?”

“I’d hate to be you.”

No doctor is going to do that.

You’d level that guy.

Or you might slap that woman, which probably isn’t the best thing to do.

But you’d be scared shitless.

You’d want to throttle them.

“What the fuck are you telling me that for?”

You don’t want to do that in your journal.

You don’t want to scare the shit out of yourself when you refer back to it.

You want it to be neutral and without emotion.

But when you write, “I was concerned about this,” you know that you’re saying, in a roundabout way, that it was a major issue for you.

It may have induced anxiety or fear.

But you’re not recording it that way in your journal.

Everything else apart from those events has to be sugarcoated with self-fucking-love.

Yes.

It is absolutely verbal masturbation.

It’s the thing that gets you off when you go back into your journal.

You’re loving yourself.

And there’s no reason to be ashamed of it.

It isn’t arrogance or pride.

It’s for you to read.

You’re not showing it to the world.

You’re not putting it on the New York Times Best Seller list.

It’s just for you to go back and cheerlead yourself when you need it.

Because believe me, you’re going to fucking need it.

And by going through that process, you completely desensitize yourself to the outcome.

The outcome becomes irrelevant.

Whether the trade wins or doesn’t win, you don’t care.

You’ve been here before.

You’ve been to this club before.

“I’ve gone out this many times over the years.”

“I went to this club.”

“I saw this girl several times.”

“I bought her drinks, bought her drinks, bought her drinks.”

“I thought for sure that after the fifth time I was going to get it.”

No.

So what are you going to do?

You’re not going to go back and keep doing that.

But you’re not going to stop going to the club.

You’re just not going to give that lady or that guy your attention anymore.

You’re going to do something different because it isn’t producing the result you’re looking for.

You’re going through the process.

It’s the same process you use when trying to catch these big runners.

You go in with one contract.

Then you graduate to two contracts.

You take one contract off and let the last one run.

And if it stops you out, who cares?

Your stop should be positioned so it isn’t a loss anyway.

You do this over time and completely desensitize yourself.

Eventually, you reach the point where you can hold for these longer runs.

But you cannot do it right out of the gate.

And anybody who tells you that you can do it immediately with their service, their product, or whatever the fuck they’re selling is full of shit.

Period.

They’re selling you a fucking pipe dream.

I’m telling you that you can do it.

I’m telling you that you can do more than you think you can do right now.

But you cannot do it quickly.

That’s all.

I’m being realistic.

I’m being practical.

I’m trying to speak to you using the right parameters so you can set realistic expectations and allow yourself enough time to reach these thresholds.

You may not even be aware of what you’re capable of doing.

Some of you probably don’t think you’ll ever be able to catch a 100-handle run.

Some of you are struggling to find five handles.

You’re thinking:

“Dude, I can’t even find five handles consistently twice a week, and you’re talking about 100 handles.”

Maybe the way I’m talking to you right now sounds like word salad.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you because it feels unobtainable.

That’s okay.

It’s unobtainable for right now.

I promise you, when I first started doing this shit on November 5, 1992, at nine o’clock on a Thursday evening in my Aunt Barb and Uncle Stan’s house, I did not know what I know about trading today.

I didn’t even know it was possible to know what I know now.

So how the fuck can you place limitations on yourself when you just started?

If you’ve been doing this for less than two years, you’re still fucking new.

You’re brand new.

You have no idea what the fuck is going on yet.

So why are you placing all this weight on your shoulders?

Nobody successful would do that.

Nobody successful would go back in a time machine and tell their two-year-experienced self:

“What the fuck?”

“You’re not doing enough.”

“You should be doing this by now.”

Nobody would do that.

But some of you think you should be doing that to yourselves.

And that is toxic thinking.

If you do that in anything—personal relationships, exercise, weight loss, a hobby, or anything you’re trying to become good at—it tears you down.

Here’s a perfect example.

My eyes aren’t as good anymore.

I’m older.

I’ve been looking at screens all my life.

I have light sensitivity and a lot of other shit going on.

So when I go to the range and shoot, my eyes fatigue much sooner than they used to.

I’m reaching an age where I’m an older guy.

So I’m really beginning to see changes in my body and in my ability to do things I could do when I was younger.

It’s a little unsettling for me.

I used to be able to do this, and now I can’t do it as well.

But if you tear yourself down and say:

“Oh, I can’t do this anymore.”

“This is miserable.”

“I’m a failure now.”

What is that going to do for you?

It isn’t going to make you better.

And it doesn’t make you macho to say:

“Oh, you’re being a pussy.”

Talking to yourself like that doesn’t make you macho.

It doesn’t make you stronger.

What it really does is beat down your subconscious.

And your subconscious manifests through your emotions and your psychological response to stress.

So when you’re out there beating your chest and saying:

“Oh, I’m a pussy.”

“I just need to learn how to hold these trades longer.”

“I don’t know why I can’t hold these trades anymore.”

You’re charging your subconscious with so much underlying anxiety that it will always be there at the exact moment you begin to feel uncomfortable doing the thing you say you want to do.

You tell people:

“This is my goal.”

“I want to be a 100-handle trader.”

“I want to catch these trades and make $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 a month.”

Okay.

That’s a dream.

When you say it, it becomes a goal.

When you begin working toward it, narrow your focus, and keep the bullshit from getting in, it’s no longer just a dream.

It’s a goal.

And it becomes an accomplishment when you go through the process of taking that dream, turning it into a goal, putting the work behind it, and filtering out all the bullshit.

That’s how people get there.

But you don’t get there by pushing blindly through an uncomfortable period without a process for evaluating what you need to do.

You do it marginally.

Incrementally.

Hold on a little longer during the next trade.

And when you feel uncomfortable, stop.

Close the trade.

You’re getting out in profit.

What’s the problem?

Did you make whatever you made on that trade yesterday?

Probably not.

So are you improving?

Yes.

Are you profitable?

Yes.

Are you adding to your bottom line for the month, the week, and the day?

Yes.

Where the fuck is the shortcoming?

But in your mind, you’re saying:

“It’s not enough.”

“It’s not enough.”

It’s the same thing every man thinks before he lies down with a woman.

Yes, we’re talking in crude terms right now.

But that’s the reality.

Men always do this to themselves.

They always think:

“What am I going to be like to her?”

“When we lie down together, am I going to measure up?”

That’s what men do all the time.

All the time.

And women don’t usually bring that same thinking into their trading.

They’re not looking at a trade and thinking:

“Am I going to pull this trick off like I did with the last guy I was with?”

No.

You’re not doing that.

It’s money.

But to men, everything becomes a measurement.

Who can do it longer?

Who lasts longer?

Who is longer?

That has nothing to do with fucking trading.

It has nothing to do with the markets.

But that’s what you’re thinking.

And even if you aren’t thinking about it right then and there, you’re thinking:

“When I get this payout, I’m going to go out here and get this girl.”

Yeah.

You’re trading because you want to get screwed.

And you’re rushing to get there because you think the money is going to make you attractive.

You think it’s going to make you more significant.

Therefore, the women are going to want to warm up to you.

Maybe they will.

But do you really want one who does that?

The entire perspective in this industry is fucking skewed with younger men.

They don’t know what they’re doing.

They’re running around doing stupid shit and rushing to make money for all the wrong reasons.

I don’t know who needed to hear that.

But there it is.

Everything about trading is between your ears—in that seven-pound universe we call the brain.

It’s a wonderful organ.

God has been gracious enough to give us a supercharged computer capable of performing so many processes so quickly—infinitely faster than anything we can create.

I don’t give a fuck who says otherwise.

We have a personality.

We have a spirit.

We have a part of ourselves that we bring into trading.

And all of those things are going to have a major impact.

They can have a positive impact.

But unfortunately, in the beginning, most of it is negative.

You’re coming in here with needs:

“I need to make more money.”

“I need to be able to pay my bills.”

“I need to become more profitable so we can live in a better house.”

“That way, I can have a better relationship because I don’t live well enough to attract the woman or man I’d like to have.”

“I’m doing this because I’m lonely.”

You don’t need to be with somebody else right now because you’re hurting and think trading will compensate for that.

It won’t.

You’re still going to be lonely.

Having lots of money doesn’t make you less lonely.

In fact, I imagine it would be worse to have a lot of money and still be lonely.

So money doesn’t fix that.

Being successful as a trader doesn’t fix those things.

Those are external issues you have to work out outside of trading.

Don’t come into trading expecting trading and profitability to fix those things, because they won’t.

They won’t fix an abusive relationship.

They won’t make you better able to deal with it.

If you’re in a toxic relationship, get the fuck out of it.

Simple.

Hard, but simple.

Maybe you don’t feel appreciated by the person you’re with right now.

Maybe you can’t leave them because you’re codependent.

That’s your circumstance.

I understand.

Do what you have to do to improve yourself, build yourself up, and create the opportunity to leave on your own terms so you no longer need them.

And maybe they’ll recognize the error of their ways.

Maybe you can forgive them and let them back in once you’ve shown them you no longer need to be codependent.

Maybe he’ll appreciate you more.

Maybe she’ll appreciate you more.

And if they return to the same toxic behavior, break free from it and live with someone who truly respects you.

That way, you can have a fruitful life.

Really live.

Some of you think you’re already living and just need more money.

That might be true.

But something terrible may happen where you begin making a lot of money, become comfortable and successful, and then your personal life becomes toxic because of the money.

You don’t know how your spouse or the person you’re in a relationship with is going to react when you start making a lot of money.

It may become a source of division.

These are all things you don’t know yet.

And I’m not trying to create anxiety for you.

But what you think you’re getting into this for and what you think it’s going to be like—you don’t know.

You don’t know.

So keep all of those things in the back seat.

Keep driving forward.

Keep your eyes on the windshield, not the rearview mirror.

The windshield gives you the larger perspective.

You have to monitor where you’re going, identify the hazards ahead, and navigate through them.

The things behind you are in the rearview mirror.

That’s why it’s so small.

They’re insignificant.

You’ve already experienced them.

You don’t have to relive those experiences.

You don’t have to go down that road anymore.

Once you cross the bridge of going through the process of discovering who you are and how you’re going to fuck yourself up in trading, that’s the most important thing.

It’s not how to enter a trade.

It’s not which timeframe to trade.

It’s not which ICT model, program, or mentor to follow.

It’s how you are going to mess yourself up.

How are you going to do it?

Because all of us do it.

There has never been a trader who entered this industry without bringing some kind of baggage or bullshit that caused a blown account, a failure, or a point of struggle.

Everybody.

We’re all human.

We all bring that stuff into this.

And you don’t know what it’s going to be for you.

Some of you probably think you do.

But you’re going to discover there’s more shit than just that.

If you’re disorganized and impulsive, you’re going to find out because that’s how your trading will be.

“I don’t journal.”

Because you’re disorganized.

“I don’t know when to take a trade.”

Because you’re impatient.

That means you’re not following a rule-based idea.

I tell you when to focus on trades.

It’s within a 60-minute window.

It’s an obvious formation in price reaching for a pool of liquidity above or below.

What are you wrestling with?

Which timeframe?

Start with the 5-minute chart.

If you can’t see it on the 5-minute, drop down to the 4-minute.

If you can’t see it on the 4-minute, drop down to the 3-minute.

If you can’t see it on the 3-minute, drop down to the 2-minute, then the 1-minute.

If you have access to a seconds chart, drop down to the 30-second chart.

But I wouldn’t touch anything below that.

You don’t have the experience for it.

And if you can’t see it on the 1-minute chart, don’t do anything.

Wait for the next session.

“But ICT—”

But nothing.

You’re already showing that you can’t follow rules.

There’s your problem.

You want to trade every session, every day.

I’m not promising you that.

Not in the beginning.

I can’t.

Because I know you don’t have the experience.

And somebody needs to hear this shit.