Navigating Markets & High Probability Trading

Date: 2023-05-29

I want to talk a little bit about navigating the markets and high-probability trading. I’m going to revisit some ideas as I go along — things we’ve either touched on or taught in great detail on my YouTube channel — and use them to recalibrate you.

Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted by the everyday responsibilities of running a family. And even if you’re alone or solo, there are still plenty of things that can distract you: your personal responsibilities, work, school, or whatever else is drawing your attention and energy. Those things can suck the life out of you. You don’t want to study, you don’t want to look at the chart, and you want something really easy — something “1, 2, 3, get me in and I’m done.” You don’t want to think too much about the marketplace.

I’ve tried to do the best I could this year to adopt a teaching approach for people dealing with that kind of challenge. And I understand that the more advanced things I’m making available to everyone can feel overwhelming.

It’s easy for someone who doesn’t have a lot of time — or, if I’m being honest, someone who is lazy, because most of the time that’s what it is — to feel overwhelmed by it. Sometimes readers or listeners hear me say that and get offended. They think, “Who is this guy? I’m not listening to him. He’s talking down to me.”

No, I’m telling you the facts.

Most students who come through my fold, whether through private mentorship or now publicly while I’m teaching for free, the ones who don’t make it will swear up and down that they put in the time. They’ll swear up and down that they studied enough.

I saw a guy on Twitter the other day saying, “I’m sick and tired of hearing that I haven’t studied long enough or haven’t put in the time.” When I see that, I mute you. I’ll let you keep seeing my content, but I’m going to mute you, because that is a toxic mindset.

It took me six years. Six years — with no encouragement, and no one sitting there pouring insights and encouragement into me.

In terms of educators, teachers, or people I bought books and courses from, none of them made themselves available the way I’ve tried to make myself available to you.

I went through a lot of emotional turmoil and psychological carnage, and it was all self-induced. But at the time, if you had asked me, I would have sworn up and down that it was the last person I tried to listen to. And that is a bitter pill to swallow when you are brand new, impulsive, or lazy.

It’s easy to say, “Oh, it’s that guy’s fault. That person’s course messed me up.” But really, that is just you trying to relinquish all responsibility. And in this industry, whether you realize it or not, you have chosen to take on one of the most challenging things there is. It requires the utmost focus and 100% personal responsibility.

There is nobody to blame for anything you do with your money except you. I don’t put some kind of hypnotism on you and make you buy or sell anything. No other educator does that either. If they have a product, and you use that as the catalyst to enter a trade, and it loses, whose responsibility is that? Yours. Absolutely yours.

It is easy to feel like a victim when you are unorganized. It is convenient for people to reach for excuses: “This guy isn’t really teaching everything. He’s holding something back,” or “The free trial worked and sucked me in, but then when I paid for it, the black-box system failed me.” That is someone who is not really equipped to be a trader. I’m going to be blunt: that is exactly what it is.

If you are trying to become a trader, you need to understand that the first few years will involve a lot of uphill struggle. There will be a lot of hit-and-miss, moments where you think you have it, and then you fall back a few steps. If you’re lazy, or if you’re not truly committed and passionate about doing this, it is easy to talk yourself right out of it.

That is why many college dropouts drop out. They are influenced by friends, family, or someone they admire, and they say, “I’m going to follow that person’s footsteps.” They begin pursuing a college degree, and then in their first year they start wondering, “Is this too much? Is this even worthwhile?” That question comes up more often because they don’t actually like what they’re doing. They are not passionate about it.

When I was a working man in my 20s, I was plagued by this haunting desire to be outside the normal path. I wanted to be something different. I didn’t want to be trapped in the mundane existence that everyone in my family considered success: a 30-year mortgage on a house, paying 11% interest.

You may be complaining right now that mortgage interest rates are high, but I watched my uncles and aunts buy homes for $80,000 or $90,000 — decent houses at the time, not upscale, but decent — and some of them ended up owing three times more than the original purchase price because they were not good stewards of their money and finances. They made poor decisions.

I didn’t want to follow anyone’s footsteps. I wanted to be different. I wanted to trailblaze. And everyone around me did their best to discourage me. That is typically how the enemy works. He slips in through the mouth of a loved one, a friend, a coworker. And social media has provided a wonderful stage for that, because he can slip into DMs, tweets, replies, comment sections, and YouTube comments to steal your joy, your pursuit of excellence, and your passion.

When you are navigating these markets, it is extremely important to do your best not to surround yourself with too many influencers. Because influencers — let’s just be blunt — want attention. Attention turns into clicks, clicks turn into monetized videos, and monetized videos eventually turn into sales.

Everybody says, “Can you do this?” And I’m doing this with a demo account, folks. I hope you understand that. I’ve disarmed all of them because they want to come in and say, “You’re using a demo.”

Yes, I’m absolutely using a demo, because I’m teaching. By doing that, I’m staying outside the scope of any legal issue because I’m not acting as a financial advisor. We’re talking about candlesticks and where they’re likely to go next. You can’t lose money from that, and you can’t make money from that.

But the people who read between the lines say, “Wait a minute. This guy is doing it with a demo account, and if I learn what he’s doing, what could I do with that?” Exactly. Exactly.

But the people out there trying to compete against me will create all kinds of nonsense. They’ll talk about me on their live streams, saying I only trade demo. That’s not true. I teach in demo. I teach a lot in demo because I’m your educator.

And I’m not influenced or deterred by anyone on social media saying, “You’re teaching or trading a demo account, bro? Really?” Look at what I’ve done with a demo. I don’t advertise. Everything that has grown in our community is organic.

And you know where the best growth has come from? Me not being dramatic. There’s a lesson in that, folks.

The internet is huge. For those of you trying to get your own thing going, or who have already been doing it but haven’t found your footing yet, there is such a massive audience out there. I’m not taking your audience from you.

When you come into this industry, you’re met with all kinds of enticement: quit your job, get rich, drive these cars, go to fancy places, get finer-looking women, get a better man — all of those types of things.

I found out early on that those were not my initial motivators. But once I had a taste of money — those first few winning trades where I felt like I had it figured out, even though I didn’t — that became a problem. That’s one of the dangers in your first few years of trading: you’re going to be convinced you’ve figured it out. Even if you receive short-term, immediate reward from doing something, you may not really understand what you did. You’re just focused on the fact that you made money.

And because you want to feel good about yourself — and for people like me, where I felt like I had to prove something to the world because my parents didn’t want anything to do with me — that money can become dangerous.

My own parents didn’t want me. I was scheduled to be aborted. I wasn’t even supposed to be here, but God said otherwise. Because of that, I had a chip on my shoulder, and I still do. The first person who gave me fatherly love and attention was my grandfather. Everything I do in life, I often wish I could get his approval, but I can’t. So it remains like a fire under me that just keeps burning.

When I started making money, the thing that helped me navigate through the ups and downs became distorted. I started thinking, “Wait a minute, if I can make that much money, and if I did that many contracts on that type of move, I could make $20,000 a month. If I make $20,000 a month, that’s almost a quarter-million dollars a year. So I’m going to trade more aggressively. I want to make more money because I like how it feels.”

And if I could start flashing it and showing it to other people, then maybe I could scratch that itch. And I did those things. But you know what? It didn’t work.

It was like a mosquito bite. You feel it bite you, it injects that little thing, sucks the blood out of you, and then you either smack it or start scratching. But once you scratch it, the histamine in your skin goes crazy and it starts itching even more.

That’s what it was like for me. What I thought would satisfy that itch — making me feel significant, making me feel like I had arrived, making me feel like I was worth being here — only made it worse.

I didn’t find a purpose in life until I found trading. This was my purpose for being here. I’m more convinced of that now, as I approach 51 in August. I’m convinced that’s why I’m here. And it’s not arrogance, because I resisted that for a long time.

How did all these things happen? My mother had just recently had an abortion before getting pregnant with me. And it was only because my father threatened to take her life — literally — that she gave birth to me.

So imagine coming into the world that way. Your father is locked up in prison for contract murder, serving two consecutive life sentences plus 20 years, then picking up more time for trying to escape in the early 80s. He’s never getting out. He’s going to die in there. And my mother didn’t want anything to do with me.

So I know what it’s like for those of you trying to find your way out here. You want to feel like you are somebody special. You want to feel like you matter, like you have a purpose.

And you end up having these montage moments. That’s how it was for me when I was young. I would play music in my mind while I was driving around doing my job, thinking, “When I get successful, it’s going to be like this. When I get successful, I’m going to show that person.”

And maybe you’re laughing because you’ve done that too. You’d never tell anybody, but that’s what it was for me.

When I taught on BabyPips, a lot of my lectures were framed almost like an action movie — like some Tom Clancy sniper-type thing. And it caught on. It reached an audience. That audience learned. They learned how to trade, and when other people asked them where they learned, they said, “From this guy on BabyPips.” Then more people came, and it kept growing and growing.

I don’t know where you are in your walk. I don’t know where you are in your learning. I don’t know where you are in the world. I don’t know your state of mind.

But I’ve always had this deep-rooted desire to be identified, recognized, and to matter.

I knew I had something that, if I made it available to other people, you would all eat it up — because it is the market. It is the market.

But in those early years, I was still fleshing out the things I had to overcome as a person. It was me doing all the damage. It wasn’t the tools. It wasn’t the concepts. It was me trying to force it when it wasn’t there.

And you may not realize this yet, but you can become a really good trader by learning from me. You can become a really good trader learning from someone else too, if they have something that works.

The things that derail you are always internal. They are always internal.

I want all of you to succeed. I want all of you to do well. I want all of you to make money, because the next few years are going to become harder. It’s going to get stupid.

You’ve probably been watching how the markets have behaved. Early in May, I told you that one of the seasonal tendencies I like to look for is weakness or a sell-off in stock indices during May, carrying down into June. If you’ve gone through the core content, you’ve heard me talk about seasonal tendencies, and I give you very specific ones.

I got those from Steve Moore. I’ve already shared his website and such, but he doesn’t know me. Maybe he does now, because I’ve probably sent a lot of people his way, but I don’t get any kickbacks. And Steve, if you’re listening, I don’t want one. I think he has the superior product when it comes to commodities and markets overall. His seasonal tendencies are absolutely the pinnacle. If you’re going to do anything with seasonality in markets, he is the person to go to. He has the data, and the way he does it is not form-fitted.

When I first read Larry Williams’ commodity trading book, it felt revolutionary. He was one of the first people to put something like that into print in a major way. When I was coming up, people like Jake Bernstein also made a big deal out of seasonal tendencies. But it wasn’t until Steve Moore created his product — showing relationships over 5-year, 15-year, 25-year, and 30-year periods — that I started looking at seasonality the way I do now.

For example, when eggs used to be a futures contract, when do you think egg prices would go up? Right before Easter, because everyone was buying eggs to dye them. Every year, traders knew when to buy eggs. That same kind of thing existed in pork bellies. If you eat bacon, that comes from the pork belly. They don’t trade pork bellies anymore either, but those thinner markets had a high degree of accuracy in their seasonality.

Steve Moore brought in a perspective that, if he hadn’t done it, I probably wouldn’t have considered. I think he revolutionized the whole viewpoint of seasonality by comparing how a seasonal tendency performed over different periods of time: the last five years, the last 15 years, the last 25 or 30 years. If a seasonal tendency delivers a specific directional tendency in a given market, and all three lookback periods agree, then to me — and I’m sure he would probably say the same thing — that is a very strong seasonal tendency.

That is what I did in the core content, where I used his seasonal tendency charts and said, “These are my favorite seasonal tendencies,” because I saw them as strong. I go into detail about why I believe that and show it visually using his product. If you are going to trade with seasonal tendencies, you should support him as a content creator. I get nothing for saying that. It is simply insight you really can’t get anywhere else at that level. There are many websites with seasonal tendency graphs, but to me, they are substandard. They are nowhere near what Steve Moore does.

Frankly, if I were him, I would charge more money. And you’re probably cussing me right now, thinking, “What are you doing, ICT?” But his product, in the hands of someone who knows how to trade, is literally like a roadmap. I can look at those graphs and say, “Okay, in the fall, in this specific month, I want to be a short seller,” or, “In this month, in this particular market, I want to be a long trader.”

As a new trader, that sounds impossible, because books and educators tell you everything is random. They tell you that you can’t time the market and that you have to react to price. That is absolute bullshit. You cannot adopt that logic and become an independent, consistently profitable trader. I’m convinced of that because I tried my hardest to do exactly that, and it’s the same nonsense most people follow. That is why the 90% losing statistic exists.

But listen: what people fail to realize is that there is another party on the other side of those trades. It is a net-zero game. For every winner, there is someone on the other side.

The paradigm shift I had was this: when I first started, I was absolutely part of that 90% losing crowd. I was there. I was buying books thinking they would help me, that they would change my direction and put me on the right path. But what I failed to understand was this: if I’m buying the same book that had already been for sale for years before I even started, why hadn’t everybody else already figured it out?

When I stopped buying books, that’s when I started learning. When I stopped system-hopping and stopped looking for the next person to mentor Michael, that’s when I put my ass in front of the charts and said, “Okay, I don’t know anything. I’m nobody. I’m at zero.”

Then I asked myself: what do I want to do? Where is my focus? Looking at these markets and the opportunity they present, where do I want to go with this? What can I do with the job I have?

At that time, I had a job that required me to be out in Owings Mills very early in the morning. The whole workday was about 12 and a half to 13 hours. I couldn’t sit in front of live charts, because I was all over Baltimore City and Baltimore County filling vending machines and fixing coffee machines. Even on the way home, I’d often have to stop and fix a machine because someone called and said something wasn’t working. My boss Glenn would say, “I need you to do this,” and that was it. I couldn’t just go home and do what I wanted after work. I was stopping for service calls.

So I had to come up with a way to determine what the hell I was going to do. That was difficult for me, because I felt that if I could sit in front of the charts and watch one-hour charts in real time, I could do very well. But I couldn’t have real-time charts while driving around and stepping into service calls.

The next best thing for me was to find a quick device or method that would tell me where I wanted to be a buyer. In the beginning, I wasn’t a short seller. I didn’t understand short selling. I was afraid of it. It didn’t make sense to me. How can you sell something you don’t own and make money? What the hell is that?

So I only wanted to be a buyer. My model was buy-model only.

What was the driving force behind my decision to become a buyer? I was looking at a 9-period and 18-period exponential moving average on the daily chart, plus a 50-day simple moving average. Don’t do this now, folks. Don’t take this as gospel. I’m just telling you how I started and how much things have evolved.

I wanted to see the 50-day moving average sloping upward. It didn’t matter whether it was gradual or steep. If it was higher than it was 20 days ago, then I was looking for longs. But that alone didn’t give me the buy.

I wanted to see the 9-day EMA above the 18-day EMA. But it couldn’t just cross and immediately trigger me. I had to wait for the cross, and then it had to spend at least three days above the 18-day EMA. In my mind, that meant momentum was absolutely going long.

I did not get the best entries. I didn’t catch the lows. I was afraid of trying to do that, because Larry Williams said not to try to catch falling daggers, and he was my mentor. So I said, “Fuck that. I’m not doing that. I’m going to wait for it to be moving, then get in sync with it.”

So what was my entry mechanism? In the evening, once I finally got home, exercised, ate, and showered, I would spend all night studying — sometimes going to work the next day with less than three hours of sleep.

Now, I don’t require a lot of sleep. I don’t know why people think they have to sleep their whole fucking life away. Eight hours of sleep, to me, feels like you’re wasting it.

You would probably do much better if you got to a point where you didn’t have to have a job, and you could work in small sessions the way I do: two four-hour sleep sessions, broken up, with naps in between when I can. I get so much done that way. That’s why some of you ask, “Do you ever sleep?” Yes, I sleep. I schedule sleep.

But I don’t have the same fears of the world that you do. You worry about losing your job. You worry about making sure your kids have college funds. You worry about how you’re going to put food on the table if your job no longer needs you and makes you redundant. I don’t have those fears.

And when you don’t have those fears, you’re energized. Because that shit is like a vampire. It sucks the life out of you. And in the beginning, doing this is difficult because you still have all those real-world cares and responsibilities. They are real. You are not exaggerating. Believe me, I experienced all of that.

But for me, the desire to get the fuck out of that was stronger than any fear I had. I had to do this, because I couldn’t continue living a mundane existence. I can’t do that. I’m not wired for that.

So I had to go in during the evenings and look at one-hour charts using end-of-day updated data. This wasn’t even real-time. I was downloading my data and using MetaStock as my charting platform.

MetaStock was a charting package, kind of like TradeStation or SuperCharts. SuperCharts isn’t really a thing anymore, I don’t think, but TradeStation is still around. They evolved into a brokerage. But MetaStock was my joint. That was my weapon.

And in the beginning, I thought I had everything figured out with that. I had every indicator you could put on a chart. You couldn’t even see my candles — and back then, I wasn’t using candlesticks anyway, I was using open-high-low-close bars. But you couldn’t even see price. I didn’t get shit because I thought the indicators were the trick. I thought they were the thing. Don’t look at price, right? Price is the distraction.

When in fact, the indicators were the distraction.

That’s why I turn my nose up at that stuff, because I fell victim to all of it. And yes, there is absolutely a way to use indicators with my concepts and make money. Absolutely, you can. But the problem is that you end up falling into this trap: which indicators should I use, what settings should they have, which ones are better for what?

There are all kinds of books written about indicators. And if you buy 12 different books about indicators, rarely will they agree on the settings. Rarely will they agree on how to use them or when to apply them. But they all have the ability to go back in time and find cherry-picked examples where the shit worked perfectly. Then when you go out there and try to do it, you get wrecked.

I went through that for years, convincing myself every single time I failed that it was just the indicator. “It’s the right indicator, but this guy doesn’t have the right settings. I’ll buy another book, another course, another DVD, and they’ll give me the part this guy left out.”

And it never worked like that. It never fucking worked.

So I started thinking, there are so many holes in this industry. There is so much opportunity for someone who actually knows how to do something. Why doesn’t someone come out and produce something that works? Something that removes all the bullshit, cuts straight down to the bone, and says: no fluff, no indicator, this is what price is going to do, and I don’t give a shit if you believe it or not because this is how it’s going to be.

I couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere, and I couldn’t find anybody doing that. So I decided I was going to be that.

That was my passion. I was going to fill all the potholes in this industry where the shit doesn’t work. I was going to fill that in and give you something that works. Not only something that works, but something precise — down to when you can expect it to form, what days, what months, what markets, what direction, and what time. All of that was my passion.

But it started with a very simple little bullish divergence when the market was oversold on a 60-minute chart.

What market? The bond market.

I segued from currency futures into bonds around my second year, and I liked bonds. They trended easily. When they started moving, they tended to move for a good period of time. I wanted to be part of momentum. Currency trends were great too, but the gaps were scary. I wasn’t able to hold anything overnight because I wasn’t aware of how Globex traded. I didn’t understand the overseas time difference or how markets behaved during those sessions. I was brand new to all of that, so I was afraid to touch it.

If I did any trading in currency futures, it was day trading only. And many times, I would get out way before the market closed because I was afraid — stone-cold afraid — of doing it wrong. Back in the 90s, if you looked at a currency futures contract, sometimes it could gap a lot. If you were holding something overnight, you could wake up completely decimated.

So I said, “I’m going to focus on bonds. I’m going to specialize there.”

My model really began on the back of the 30-year Treasury bond, using a 60-minute chart.

Now remember, my daily settings were this: the 50-day simple moving average had to be sloping up. That’s all it needed to do. The 9-day exponential moving average had to be above the 18-day exponential moving average, but it had to remain above it for at least three days. I wasn’t trading it like a moving average crossover or golden cross. I needed it to have already moved.

Then I looked for 60-minute, or one-hour, oversold conditions that presented a standard bullish divergence: price would create a lower low, but the stochastic I was using — 14, smoothed by 3, 3 — would create a bullish divergence.

If that formed, I would look for the opening price, which is why I had QuoteTracker. I would watch that opening price and wait for price to trade just a little bit below it. If it did, I would buy five ticks above the opening price, thinking I was buying strength.

Where did I get that from? Larry Williams. He bought strength. He was buying on stops.

That was my model.

I didn’t understand buying with limit orders because I didn’t know where to place my limit order. I was afraid that if I placed a limit order and got filled, price would keep going down. I didn’t really know how to place a stop loss yet. It was all brand new.

So when I caught a runner, man, it was great. It was amazing. But when I placed the order and the stop loss, you had to use an OCO — order cancels order — a contingent pair. Back then, you called your broker and said, “I want to buy Christmas bonds,” which was the December contract of the 30-year Treasury bond, “at this price.” They’d ask, “Where’s your stop? Do you want to use a stop?” Yes. Then you’d tell them how many ticks away.

I used a 10-tick stop. That was about $300-something per contract, and in the beginning, I was trading one contract. I had no target. I would just wait and see how price behaved.

Sometimes it would fill me and then stop me out. And that would wreck my whole fucking day. I’d be filling machines, paying for gas, and just be mad. I was pissed.

So I’m just like you. When the shit doesn’t go right, you want to blow up. You want the world to know you’re pissed off. You don’t want anyone asking what you did wrong, but you want them to understand: “I’m having a bad day. Don’t talk to me.”

So I’d be driving all around Baltimore City and Baltimore County, filling vending machines, pissed off that I couldn’t see what the market was doing. Then I’d go home that evening, go through my normal routine — work out, get the stress out, take a shower, eat — and then look at the charts. That’s when I could see these things starting to happen.

If I had seen that on a chart, I could say, “I wouldn’t have bought there yet. I would have done this. I would have done that.” And that sounds like hindsight is 20/20. But you know how I trade now, and I can honestly tell you when I would have done something.

I’ve done it this year. I did it last year too. I’ve told you, “If I had been trading there, I would have been stopped out. If I had taken that trade, I would have lost.” It doesn’t happen a lot now, but in the beginning, it happened a lot. I did things wrong a lot, without the kind of encouragement I’m giving you.

So it’s normal for you to feel like you’re spinning your wheels in the beginning. It’s going to feel like that with anything you do in trading, because you’re competing with yourself. You have an expectation of yourself, whether you want to admit it or not. You see yourself somewhere in the future, whatever that timeline may be, and you present that as a goal. You manifest that as your destination.

But that destination is going to evolve so many fucking times over the next several years. What you think will satisfy you now is going to change a lot, especially once you start finding consistency and profitability. That idea goes out the window. Forget about it. You’ll completely change how you think about yourself, how you live, what you do with money, and how you spend it. All of that will change.

If you don’t know what it’s like to make six figures, you don’t know what that feels like. If you don’t know what it’s like to make seven figures, you don’t know what that feels like either. But you also don’t know what it feels like to lose seven figures. For some of you, that would feel like the end of the fucking world. You’d say, “That’s it. I’m never touching this market again.”

But those are lessons you may have to go through. You have to go through the ups and downs of what you think you understand versus what you actually learn by going through it.

That was the ICT model. That was what I was doing.

Then I realized there were some trades forming that escaped my observation. I couldn’t anticipate them. What helped me understand more about that was comparing the 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year bonds while they were trending lower and I was looking for an opportunity to get long.

I noticed that one of those yields would diverge. And I thought to myself, every time this happens, there is some measure of intermediate-term price run that forms. It gives me an opportunity to find a move. So I wanted to study it and go back in time to see whether it existed often. And I found out that it did.

Now, through the core content, you know that as my bond triad divergence — SMT divergence for the bonds.

For instance, if the stock market goes to shit, or stays in a really choppy, garbage range, I could simply go back to bonds. I can go back to where I started. That’s my home.

I moved from bonds to trading the S&P because I liked the intraday volatility the S&P could offer. Bonds were smoother and a little more controlled.

I moved from the bond market and started exploring the opportunities that index futures were offering. I would trade the stock market the same way I had been trading bonds.

If I was bullish, I would mark the opening price. Since I was already bullish, I wanted to see price try to trade down below the opening price. Even if it went down a little bit, I didn’t care. I would buy strength five ticks above the opening price.

If the trade was good, it would just run off. If it was bad, it would stop me out. And then I’d be like anybody else, losing my mind, blaming myself, blaming everything else, saying, “I should have done this, I should have done that.”

And I hurt myself by doing all of that.

That is why I teach all of you that when you are journaling, or when you are talking on social media about what you do and what you’ve done, you do not want to be negative. Because when you do that, you reinforce this idea that you’re supposed to be perfect.

And perfection does not exist. It may exist in Christ, but you’re not going to find it here. You cannot be perfect in trading. You are going to lose.

While I had a heavily indicator-based strategy in the beginning, I obviously evolved away from all of that. And yes, there is a way to use indicators. But I don’t think a new trader should start there. A new trader should primarily learn naked price action.

Over time, you’ll develop your own tools, which is what I’ve done over the years — things you can apply to price, but not things that manipulate price. I don’t use anything that measures rate of change. I don’t use CCI. I don’t use oversold or overbought indicators. No stochastic, no RSI, none of those things. They are all measuring rate of change.

And whatever you’re doing with those indicators depends on the inputs you’re using. For instance, I was using a 14-period stochastic at one point. Then I moved from 14 periods to 10 periods, then to 9 periods, smoothed by 3 and 3 on a slow stochastic. That’s what I had.

Then I would use a 9-period Williams %R. And I started noticing that sometimes the Williams %R would give me the oversold condition I was looking for, but the stochastic wouldn’t. Then price would start running off, and I’d be thinking, “What the hell just happened here? It shouldn’t have done that. It’s supposed to listen to this indicator, for fuck’s sake. Why is it doing that?”

I wasted years arguing with the market about why it wasn’t listening to an indicator.

When I first teach students under my wing, the first thing I tell them to do is take everything off their charts. Take everything off completely. Naked chart only: open, high, low, close, or candlesticks. That’s it.

Then you study price in relationship to time.

When do intraday moves occur?

When do intraweek moves occur?

Is there an influence you can set a clock to, such as the economic calendar?

All of that is built into what you anticipate is going to happen on the weekly chart. Is the weekly chart most likely going to expand higher, or is it more likely to expand lower? That sets the tone for what you want to focus on going into the new week.

Is the market really close to a target you’ve been watching? If so, it may expand up into a premium level or a higher-timeframe resistance point. For those who are brand new and don’t know my terminology, that would mean you may anticipate some measure of potential intraweek reversal.

But you still need to stick with the narrative that it is not advised to try to pick tops. I don’t try to pick tops. But it does allow me to formulate a game plan.

For instance, we were bullish on NASDAQ, and I took your attention to a very specific gap on the weekly chart. Hopefully, I’ve dispelled the confusion, because invariably, people in my comment section ask why I’m using the June contract and not the continuous contract.

If you are looking for volume imbalances, you need to use the specific contract month. That is a characteristic of that specific PD array, and it is one of the reasons I get frustrated when people pretend they understand it and then try to make courses about it. They don’t know what they’re doing.

The continuous contract is too smooth, and it will not show the same inefficiencies that exist in thinly traded contract months.

What do I mean by that?

Right now, we are trading the June contract of the E-mini S&P. In a couple of weeks, it will roll over, and as traders, we will start following the September contract. But the whole time, the December contract is also trading — thinly traded, but still trading.

The inefficiencies in price action in those future delivery months matter while we are trading the front month. Right now, the front month for ES is the June contract. The next month out is September. So if you are studying ES, the September contract symbol on TradingView would be ESU2023. For December, it would be ESZ2023.

Those contracts are not going to mark to market perfectly the same. They are not identical. When they first become available and start trading, there will be very gappy, inefficient price delivery. When you blend that with the present-day narrative — which is essential for understanding where price is likely to go — then you have something useful.

That is what I teach, and that is what needs to be mentored. I can’t simply write a book and tell you in one paragraph or one chapter, “This is the be-all and end-all. This is exactly how you do it.” There are too many supporting elements you have to learn, which is why this takes time.

If you understand that your short-term expectation on price needs to be placed within the context of what higher-timeframe price action is doing, then many of the things you’re wrestling with right now will diminish. Not entirely, but they will diminish greatly, because you’ll be looking for the higher-timeframe perspective to unfold.

That is a macro perspective — not “macro” in the sense of the short algorithmic macros I talk about, but macro as in the broader price perspective.

You have macro and micro perspectives.

Macro would be the weekly and monthly charts. Intermediate-term would be the daily and four-hour charts. Short-term would be one-hour and lower. Micro would be five-minute and lower.

So there is a hierarchy in price delivery. And what may appear bullish on one timeframe may simply be a retracement into a longer-term sell model.

In 1995, I had my ass handed to me on the Swiss franc. I was looking at the weekly chart, and I expected it to form some kind of bull flag. That is where the idea of fake bull flags eventually became a thing for me.

As time went on, I told some of my friends, “Look, I’m going long on the Swiss franc.” They asked, “What do you think it’s going to do?” I said, “I think it’s going to go up this much.”

What I did not understand at the time was that price was simply going up into a small inefficiency — something I understand now and teach you today. It was actually going to go lower, and a lot lower.

That was one trade I wrestled with. I was convinced it was going to move in my favor, so I kept opening up my stop. Among my friends, they got stopped out, but I held on.

Why? Why did Michael, rookie sensation ICT, think it was smart to keep opening up the stop?

That means I was widening it. Wherever I had my initial stop loss protecting the long entry, I kept thinking, “Okay, I know I’m right, but I’m probably wrong about where I placed my stop. I just need to sit through a little more.” So I opened it up more, and more, and more.

Then I started thinking, “Okay, now this thing really looks like it wants to go down. It’s going to go right to my stop. I’ll just take the stop off.”

Well, that thing fucking tanked.

I experienced a $6,000 loss per contract. That is not fun. That is not fucking fun — especially when you’re not in front of the chart watching it happen. You’re just seeing numbers change on the screen.

I thought, “Okay, this is bullshit. This is painful.”

That lesson, that pain, that uncomfortable state, would have taken many of you out of this entirely. You would have said, “I’m never doing this again.”

Was I embarrassed because my friends saw me lose big? Absolutely. I was completely demoralized. But I turned it around and said, “Okay, that is never going to happen again.”

I knew I was wrong, but I arm-wrestled it. I knew I was fucking wrong. I was under the pressure of the market’s thumb, and it was giving me all the time in the world to save my own neck — but I wouldn’t listen.

I came in with my preconceived notion that this is what the market was going to do. I married the trade. I sold my soul to that trade. I was not going to let go of it, and it punished me. It tore my ass up.

That gapping feature I tell you I was afraid of — that is where I learned that lesson. This thing just kept going lower. Then the next session, I’m still holding, and it gaps further against me. I thought, “Clearly, it has to be done now.”

Nope.

Four days later, I was still in it with no stop. No stop — and the account was gone.

So I had to go back to saving money, working on weekends, delivering pizza, getting some scratch capital raised again, and then start over. At the time, the only lesson I learned was: don’t hold overnight in futures and currencies because the gaps can hurt you too much.

That was the only lesson I understood then. But now, knowing what I know, there are so many things I understand about price action that would have kept me from ever going long there. As the trader I am today, I would never have taken that long. And that’s not hindsight being 20/20. I know the things I was falling victim to, but at the time I wasn’t paying attention because I was unaware.

My understanding of the Commitment of Traders report was not what it is today. Just because the commercial traders had shown long positions weeks earlier, that didn’t mean they were still bullish. Weeks before, they had already switched to a bearish net-short position. That means if you were looking at a commercial trader net chart, they had more contracts net short than net long. In other words, they were shorting where I was buying.

I was that retail Rick who got his ass handed to him.

Years later, I looked back at that trade and thought, “Oh shit. This was one of those millionaire-maker trades, and I didn’t even see it.”

So understand who you are learning from. You are learning from someone who has far more understanding today than he had back then. At that time, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I was learning all of this right then and there. You are going through that same kind of experience now, but I’m giving you insight that is not taught anywhere else unless they learned it from me.

But you can’t get it watered down. You have to understand that there is a lot more detail behind everything I teach. And just because you are introduced to an idea, don’t fall victim to thinking you’re ready to go out and risk money. You will hurt yourself.

And that small hurt, that small loss — all losses suck, they absolutely do — but in the beginning, every loss doesn’t feel like a paper cut. It feels like having your arm cut off. You make it feel like you’re losing an appendage. You amplify the loss far beyond what it really is.

With experience, you’ll look back and say, “That was nothing.” You’re going to have a lot of paper cuts. Sometimes you’ll get a little gash here or there. Stitch it, staple it, shut the fuck up, and keep going. One small mistake does not change the model. It does not make the model inefficient or ineffective. It just means you messed it up as the operator.

Own it. Move on. Don’t dwell on it.

But if your logic is flawed from jump street, you are going to lose your ass, and you’ll be miserable at the end because you’ll remember all the times you subconsciously knew you should not have been doing what you were doing. But you didn’t listen. You couldn’t bring the strength and discipline required to simply say, “I’m getting out of this. This is wrong. I’ll worry about making the money back later. Right now, I have to stop the bleeding.”

That is the first rule: learn how to stop yourself from losing your ass.

You are going to lose money, folks. That is guaranteed. Every trader loses. Every trader.

I have learned where I lose the most, and I try not to trade in those conditions.

In April, I took road trips. I said, “Fuck this, I’m not doing this. I’m not going to sit here and call something when I know the probabilities are too low for me to be accurate.” Why feed the trolls? I’m not going to do that. I’m going to practice what I preach.

If I don’t see a reason to be in front of the charts, I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge. I’m out of here. I had a lot of fun. I relaxed. I spent time with my family. It was great.

Then I got back home when I felt things were changing. You were told in advance where we were expecting NASDAQ to draw to. You were told what we were expecting on EUR/USD and the Dollar. They behaved exactly as I outlined. You can’t change that. You can’t discount it. You can’t say it wasn’t real. It’s not hindsight, and it’s not cherry-picked. It is understanding.

And to answer some of the people who were crowing at me: “Can you teach swing trading? Can you talk about higher timeframes? I don’t want to look at a one-minute chart. I’m never going to trade a one-minute chart.”

Okay, that’s you. But the same idea of understanding what price does, how it delivers, and what makes price book the way it does — you can study hundreds of examples over a few months using one-minute data. Then you can apply that same logic to a daily, weekly, or monthly chart. It’s the same thing. It may not feel like that could be true, but that is exactly what it is.

The major discovery I had, the major epiphany, was realizing that the market is not independently doing random things all the time. It is not doing that at all. It works from higher timeframe charts down to lower timeframe charts. It trades to where liquidity is resting — below old lows, below relative equal lows, above old highs, or above relative equal highs.

That’s liquidity.

If that liquidity has already been run, and you can make the argument that you’re bearish — you’re bearish on the market and you want to get short — then you start with the higher timeframe. If the weekly chart supports lower prices, the daily chart looks like it wants to go lower, and you can clearly see where price would likely draw down to an old low or relative equal low, then you look to see whether price has recently gone into buy-side liquidity on the daily, weekly, or four-hour chart.

If it has, and then sharply moved away and started going lower, you are now in a sell model. That means the movement has already started. Someone we’ll deem as smart money is short, and their interest is for price to move toward an opposing pool of liquidity — sell-side liquidity.

Your first objective is to look for low-hanging fruit. You go to a 60-minute chart and look for a relatively equal low or a single low that has not been traded to recently. There are sell stops resting below that. That is market 101. You don’t need a book to understand it. It’s simple logic. If price moved up from there, chances are someone is holding a long position, and their stop loss is resting below that low. So the market will want to gravitate toward it.

If there is a large fair value gap — some kind of buy-side imbalance / sell-side inefficiency — below that, then you can treat the short-term 60-minute low as a partial target. Then you can try to reach into the high of that BISI, which would be like an Institutional Order Flow Entry Drill.

In this bearish example, you would look at the highest point of that buy-side imbalance / sell-side inefficiency, and then the equilibrium price point. That is how I would treat it. Then I would wait to see whether price wants to move lower. I would use the consequent encroachment of that BISI as a short-side objective if price is supporting the idea that it wants to move lower.

I would not be trying to trade the full closure of that buy-side imbalance / sell-side inefficiency. That separates me from people who think they understand this and say, “Oh, it’s going to go there because gaps have to be filled.”

They don’t have to do anything. Those gaps can stay there for a long time — longer than your fucking equity can stay in your account while you’re trying to trade for the gap fill.

So there are rules to this. There are levels where understanding and engagement must be defined, and you have to be disciplined. But you have to know what you’re looking for, and it has to be in writing.

Before I take a trade, I have an expectation of where I want to see price go. It’s written down. Same thing right now: I have a small notepad with levels I’m looking for. It may not mean anything to you, but it means something to me.

In my head, I have the narrative as to why price would do that. I don’t have time to write a whole essay while I’m trading on a one-minute chart, and sometimes lower than that.

How long does it take to write, “I believe 4111.50 is sell-side liquidity”? Forget that. If the market has already gone, it has left the station. Elvis has left the fucking building. It’s gone.

You can’t do that kind of journaling while you’re day trading. You journal after the fact. But when you’re studying and tape-reading, you mark down what you think price is likely to draw to, and you do that on your chart. That way, it’s there. Then you study what you saw.

Did price really do that? How did it behave when it did it? How long did it take? Did it go there, fall just short, and reverse?

All of those things are worthwhile studies.

Some of the best seasonal tendencies are actually the ones that fail. I mentioned that in the core content when I talked about seasonal tendencies. That was an observation I found on my own. I’m not trying to take credit for it or make it a big deal, and don’t be dogmatic about it. But when I expected certain seasonal tendencies to behave a certain way in certain markets, and they failed, they often failed in stunning fashion. Sometimes the best trade was doing the opposite of the seasonal tendency.

That became a major help to me. When I would lose money trying to align with what I believed were seasonal tendencies, and I got my ass handed to me, I eventually learned to trust being a short seller because of that pain. I took losses and went through series of losing trades while trying to force my will onto a seasonal tendency.

So don’t look at seasonal tendencies as the panacea. They are not the be-all and end-all. They are not cast in stone. They don’t always work.

I wanted to see the indices present that seasonal weakness opportunity, but when I looked through social media, everyone was expecting the market to go lower. Even the news was talking about the stock market going down. I was aware that the debt ceiling was an issue. We talked about it. But the technicals, the price action, were showing that the market was not willing to go lower. There was unfinished business on the upside.

Because of that, we maintained our focus on going long.

And for the people who don’t pay attention, they’re the same ones tweeting things like, “But what about the seasonal tendency? I thought we were supposed to go lower?”

There has to be some common sense when you’re learning this, especially with me, because I don’t have patience for stupidity. If you’re not paying attention to the fact that I’m calling for higher prices, pointing your attention to a specific level, saying price may come down and treat this fair value gap as an inversion fair value gap, and then saying I think it’s going to draw up to buy-side liquidity or a premium volume imbalance — does that sound bearish to you?

If it does, you missed the plot. Go back and start from square one, because I wasn’t trying to get you into shorts. I was drawing your attention to weekly imbalances.

Why?

Because that is the macro perspective. The macro perspective sets the tone for what the market is willing to do.

The seasonal tendency I wanted didn’t materialize. Price was stagnant and chopping around in April while I was down there on the beach. And I said it would be just like them not to send it lower. So if price wants to go up, where do I look? I go back to the weekly chart.

That is what I shared with you all.

None of my tweets get deleted. I don’t edit them when I mess up, misspell something, or say something imperfectly. It is what it is.

You’re probably thinking right now, “But I’m going to trade 28 pairs. I’m going to do this — the ghost in the Forex.”

You’re going to get your ass ghosted.

You have to narrow your focus, folks. That is not a disadvantage. It is advantageous. Your attention cannot be diluted, especially if you are going to trade the way I’m teaching. Your attention needs to be 100% on one instrument, or on a very closely correlated instrument.

People ask, “Can you talk about gold? Can you talk about crude oil? Can you talk about Bitcoin? Can you talk about this?” I don’t have the attention span to do all of those things effectively. My mind is racing a thousand miles an hour. There are so many thoughts trying to get to the front, so many things I want to say, teach, and do. I’m already wrestling with that.

If I add more markets, I won’t be effective as a teacher. That’s how it was in mentorship. Everyone wanted to add more: “Can you talk about this pair?” Can you just listen to what I’m talking about with this one? Because what I’m teaching in this one works in all of them.

So slow your roll. Roll your sleeves up and say, “Okay, he’s giving me what works. I may not be getting the flavor I want, but it will still fill my belly. I’ll learn how to apply this to my own market of choice after I learn it through what he’s teaching.”

That is the proper mindset with me. This is not a “have it your way” mentorship. We’re not taking requests. That’s not how this works. For me to be effective, I have to do what I know and not be distracted, because I am easily distracted. Very easily distracted.

Maybe some of you have experienced that too. When you’re trying to learn this, it’s easy to want to do something else. That’s why I say things like: put down the game controller, put down the bonbons, put down the potato chips. I need you to pay attention to what I’m about to say, because if you don’t listen and apply it to yourself as a trader or developing student, you’re going to be hurt by it later — and it’s avoidable.

During that period when I was away, taking road trips and such, I thought to myself: if I really wanted to mess people over, I would lean into this idea of “Sell in May and go away.” I would flood the market with uncertainty: the debt ceiling isn’t getting raised, we’re going to default, the stock market is going to get decimated. Every doom-and-gloom prepper trader channel out there was telling everyone stocks were going to crash.

Nope. They didn’t crash today. They rammed right up into a level I told you they were going to reach.

So what made that upside price action so energetic? The fact that it opposed the expected result. The expected result was that stocks should go lower — “Sell in May and go away.”

Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t sell off from here or tomorrow, and that doesn’t mean the typical May seasonality can’t begin later. It just means it wasn’t technically in the cards to go lower yet.

I’m not trying to pick the top, but I’m satisfied with where NASDAQ is.

So when I say things like that, the infants learning how to do this will immediately come out and say, “Okay, now what?” And I don’t say that to be mean, but you are an infant in this.

Look at the guys and gals in the comment section or replies to my tweets. I see it all the time — the same five or six people: “Okay, now what? What’s going to happen now?”

Dude, what the fuck? It just moved over 1,000 points. Over 1,000 talking points that not one YouTuber talked about. Not one of them. And I guarantee you, secretly, some of them have been following me, hoping they could come back and say, “He said it was going to do this, but look what happened.”

Well, guess what? You got your answer. Your answer is stretched out now.

I’m trying to help all of you, but I’m teaching practically based on what we’re seeing in the chart in real time. Where is it going next? I could do that all day long on one-minute charts. All day long. Every major intraday fluctuation, I can be part of that — up and down. I will take losses doing that. I will incur losing trades. But I can play that all day long.

Making $19,000 or $20,000 over a week using multiple contracts or demo accounts — I can do that. $19,000 in one session. I don’t need your bullshit.

So when you look at these other people out there, they’re going to try to distract you from learning this because this will help you, and it will minimize what they’re doing. Their strengths will be reduced by your ability to do this without any indicator, without any crutch, without putting one fucking thing on your chart except your own notes and annotations.

And that flies in the face of the majority of everyone on YouTube. More people are going to join the hate wagon because they think that’s how they can overcome this monster — this Frankenstein ICT.

But I’m just an average dude, man. That’s it. I’m trying to help all of you. I’m not victimizing any of you. I’m not coming after your YouTube channel and talking shit about anybody. But when you do that kind of stuff, it makes you the wrong kind of influence.

People say our community sucks. They say that because our community calls bullshit when they see it. When someone on YouTube says price is being bought up and buying pressure sends price higher, you know differently now. They don’t like that because it goes against their narrative. Their selling points are the same features that appear in books.

So of course they’re going to say our community is toxic — because we’re calling bullshit. They’re not reading the markets correctly. Even if they are making money, they are attributing their success to the wrong things.

I had plenty of that in the beginning too: moments where I was right by happenstance. But these people are 20 years old, fresh out of high school most of the time, and they’re teaching? What the fuck are they teaching?

What not to do. That’s what they’re teaching.

Don’t do those things.

This journey of yours — the journey you’re going through — is going to have peaks and mountains. You’re going to reach the top of one and feel like you’ve conquered everything.

But then you have to keep going forward.

And what happens when you’re at the top of a mountain? You have to go down.

You’re still moving forward, but you’re going down. The problem is that you may interpret that downward period as the end of your career. Then you start pushing too hard on your trades, forcing things, and trying to force setups that aren’t actually in the chart.

So what I did was use the information I gleaned from pain, blown accounts, and the real psychological warfare I put myself through.

No troll can say anything to me that would be more painful than what I already did to myself in my career as a 20-year-old. Nobody can do anything or say anything about me that makes me lose sleep. I don’t give a shit.

But you, as a new student — whether you’re learning from me or anyone else — are highly influenced. You are easy to manipulate because you’re still malleable. Bad news about anything you’re trying to do can quickly convince you, and you’ll use it as the perfect excuse to say, “Okay, this is too much effort. Yeah, it’s definitely a fraud. It’s definitely a scam. This doesn’t work.”

When in reality, you simply haven’t put in enough time doing the right things.

There are people out there spending a lot of time doing stupid shit — watching videos only. You have to be in the charts, looking at price action and studying it.

Go through the process of measuring how much drawdown the trades incur. How often do these fair value gaps form? I’ve literally removed the guesswork and reduced it down to a 60-minute time window. I gave it a cool name — the Silver Bullet — because that’s what you’re looking for: a fucking silver bullet that never misses.

If you understand narrative and you know where the next draw on liquidity is, you have a very high likelihood of making money if you know how to trade and use that model. Nobody else out there can say that, because their indicators don’t know when they’re going to change and say overbought, oversold, or divergence. They’re victims of that stuff. They’re waiting for the train wreck to happen. I’m telling you where it is going to explode, where it is going to go, and what time it is likely to form.

What guessing game do you need now?

Between 10:00 and 11:00 every day, there is a gap that can be found. Start with the five-minute chart. If it’s not on the five-minute, where do you look? Drop down to the four-minute. If you don’t see a gap there, drop to the three-minute. You learned that in the 2022 model. Some of you are acting like you never watched that material.

You have to do top-down analysis on intraday charts — micro market analysis. The five-minute chart is your higher timeframe when you’re working with very small timeframes. A five-minute chart is like a weekly chart when you’re trading from a 15-second chart.

If you don’t want to trade that way, then don’t trade that way. But use the information on higher timeframes.

Some of you complain about things I have already addressed. If you simply watched the videos and kept good notes, you would know I’ve already talked about these things. But you’re lazy. You want me to take you to the exact video and the exact minute marker, saving you all the time and effort of going through it properly.

But you learn more by going through it the normal way.

You think the one thing you’re wrestling with right now is going to be the thing that finally makes you profitable. That’s not how it works. When you learn something new, twenty more questions pop up. That’s not failure — that’s progress. And you’re afraid of it because you’re stepping into the unknown. You’re stepping into something extremely technical.

All the results are connected to your decision-making, your execution, your button-pushing, your stop-loss placement, and the amount of leverage you apply to the trade. That is all your responsibility. You need to own it.

I never sugarcoat that. The people who complain the most are usually the ones doing the wrong things, thinking that something new I teach will fix it. But the problem is you.

It was me when I was younger. I did all the same stupid shit. I was the reason I blew accounts. It wasn’t the market. It was me. Most of the time, I knew what I was doing was wrong right before the market stopped me out, and I still wouldn’t get out because I was arm-wrestling it.

Recently, I had a perfect stage to show you this. In the last six weeks or so, I introduced the idea that I would have liked to see the seasonal tendency pan out. I said that in Twitter Spaces, in a YouTube video, and in tweets. But if the market itself is showing us it is not going to do that, I’m not that same 20-year-old neophyte anymore. I’m not wrestling with my emotions about being right.

I don’t need to be right.

In fact, it’s better when I’m not right, because then I can teach you how I deal with being wrong. I’m human. If I make a mistake, how do I handle that?

Look at what I did on Friday. I was up around $11,000 or whatever it was, then down, and I forced myself to take shorts I knew could potentially pay out. But the bias was reaching that weekly volume imbalance. I even typed it out: this is not a short. You all could see it. So I was communicating that yes, there is a short there, but it is not the short I would really want. I wanted to be long.

I showed you the history — every trade, every little thing that went through. I think there was something like a $975 losing trade in there. But in the grand scheme of that day, it was nothing. If you had taken all those trades, would you really be worried about that one $975 loss? For some of you, that feels like the end of the world. It’s the rock in your shoe. You can’t go any further because it hurts too much.

That means you’re not ready.

So how do you fix that? Go back into backtesting.

For the guy who sent me a tweet this morning and said, “What do I do if I’m able to see the draw on liquidity?” First of all, you need to ask yourself: are you actually able to do that, or are you using mine?

Because if I’m calling the market direction, and you’re falsely attributing that ability to yourself, that’s a problem. Many students in the early stages think they’re ready because I’m lending them my experience. I’m giving you my 30 years of experience reading these markets so you can decide where you think tomorrow is likely to go. You can ignore me. You can fade me at your own peril. But I’m telling you where I believe the market is going next.

We’ve been doing this publicly for a couple of years now. You decide: is it accurate or not? If it is, that’s what keeps you here. That’s what keeps the community growing. If I didn’t know what I was doing, I would already be canceled. People would say, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” But you see the evidence.

But are you really able to see the next draw on liquidity?

If you are, what model are you using? What multiplier are you using? What PD array are you using to enter? It’s always changing.

As a mentor, I discovered that many students want to force one specific PD array, and usually in the beginning, that’s the order block. That is the least-taught thing I’ve done, and yet it’s what everyone wants because nobody knows what they’re doing with it.

I’ve already said this: the full order block teaching will not be released until it’s in a book, because it has already been abused poorly by other people. You don’t know what an order block is. It has nothing to do with Level 2 data. It has nothing to do with the size of orders resting in the market. It has nothing to do with that.

It is a change in the state of delivery, where the market turns from a buy model to a sell model, or from a sell model to a buy model.

I have not taught that fully to anybody. My charter members don’t know that. They were introduced to the idea, but they did not learn the full thing. If they were all in the room right now and I said, “Raise your hand if I taught that fully,” nobody would raise their hand.

If I said, “Raise your hand if I said you were only being introduced to it, and that more lectures were coming,” they would all raise their hands.

So stop believing these fucking people trying to sell you shit.

We’ve known each other for a long time, because this is how I talk to you. If you were sitting right next to me, if you were doing one-on-one mentorship with me, this is exactly how I would talk to you.

I wouldn’t sugarcoat anything. I would be honest. I would tell you where I made mistakes, what I learned from those mistakes, and I wouldn’t hide from any of it, because that is where the real learning occurs.

But so many of you are perpetual ICT students, and you don’t realize it. I understand that you like what I do, and you like how I do it. The concepts are great. But don’t lose sight of why you are learning.

You are all waiting for the next thing to be taught. It’s just like the people who show up whenever the market delivers to where I said it was likely to go. The market reaches whatever level I outlined publicly, and then those same four or five people appear in my comment section or replies saying, “Okay, what’s next?”

That’s either one of two things. It’s either somebody waiting for me to get it wrong so they can champion that all over the internet — “He said it was going to do this, but it did that” — or it’s someone who always wants to be in the marketplace.

There is a period of time between trades, and you have to become very comfortable with that period of non-engagement. When the market delivers something you anticipated, sometimes you simply watch it unfold.

We just watched that unfold in the indices. We watched it unfold in EUR/USD and the Dollar Index. I did things in Forex for the crowd that loves Forex, and then we mostly moved from that. I stayed true to the E-mini S&P because I said I was going to focus on it. But before we even started this whole parade, I told you NASDAQ was the one.

If you were trading NASDAQ, you were supposed to keep your focus on that weekly gap inside that volume imbalance. And today, we gapped up into it beautifully.

I’m satisfied.

Now what does that mean? Write this in your notes: it means I am literally neutral. I hold no bias right now.

“What do you mean you don’t hold a bias, ICT?”

I mean I enjoyed the period of time where I expected the market to perform in a specific way. I submitted myself to that expectation. I didn’t arm-wrestle it. I basked in it. I peacocked around in front of my wife about it — and if you think I’m joking, I’m not. I really do that, because I want her to see that what I do, what she sometimes thinks is a video game, is not a video game.

This is hard. It takes a lot of skill, attention, effort, focus, and you are constantly wrestling with yourself.

So when you learn how to do this and you get your victories, learn to bask in them. That’s not ego. You’re going to need those moments to lean on when you go into periods of drawdown.

You need to be able to remind yourself, “Man, it felt really good to get this right, to do everything in the analysis as I was taught, and then watch it perform exactly as expected.” That feels good. You need to set up a tent and live there for a little while — not just immediately think, “Okay, next trade.”

That is where you get your ass handed to you.

Listen closely, folks, because this is the truth: every single time I blew an account, it came immediately on the heels of something like we just experienced — where I did something right, it performed the way I expected, and it went to target.

That sugar high wears off fast. Real fast.

You think, “Oh, you called a 1,000-point move. You did this, you did that,” and all those wonderful feelings show up. You get the butterflies. You share it with your friends. You show your coworker. You show your boss. You think, “Look what I made. That paycheck you give me is nothing to me. It’s literally less than one handle on the S&P. Go fuck yourself.”

That wears off quickly. So what do you want to do? You want another hit. You want another drag on that joint we call the market. Smoking is bad for you — don’t do that. Smoke the markets instead. It’s healthier.

But don’t rush. Don’t rush to get back in and do something right away, because what you’re feeling is withdrawal. You’re all hopped up because you did something right. That’s great — champion that. Live there for a little while. Take a week off. You just did something amazing. Most people fail at this, and you adhered to one rule: stick to the model.

Don’t get caught up in the media saying, “Oh, the market is going to crash.” I would like to see that happen. I would like to see us default. It would be painful as shit, it would create carnage everywhere, but that is exactly what should happen in a real free market.

But it’s not happening. So you have to keep taking your buy signals. If the market is saying, “I’m not going down,” then the greatest pain threshold will be met by going higher.

Now here’s where narrative comes in. We transition from general market commentary to specifics. We had a seasonal tendency that even the general public knows: “Sell in May and go away.” I would have liked to see that form. But what was the chart telling me?

There was a weekly volume imbalance. Everything I took you into the charts to see was because the charts tell the story. Fuck the media. Fuck all the reports. I don’t even know what those data points say. When CPI comes out, I couldn’t tell you what the number was or what it meant. I don’t care. I don’t care to know because it’s all bullshit. It’s all fake. It’s all manipulation.

They use that as misdirection, like a magician. If I were standing in front of you and I placed something in one hand, you might swear up and down that I put it there, while it’s actually in the other hand. And while you’re watching the wrong hand, I’m dropping something into my pocket or switching it into something else. Then the reveal comes, and you say, “How did he do that?” Misdirection.

That’s what these reports are, folks.

So if you’ve never really understood why I talk about the economic calendar, it’s not because I’m a fundamental trader. Fundamentally, I think trading fundamentally is flawed. I’m technically minded. I believe the charts tell you in advance how they are going to hurt the people who believe the bullshit.

If you like trading fundamentals, those fundamentals will wreck you on intraday charts. The easiest thing to do is go to Forex Factory, click on any high-impact or medium-impact news driver, and read how they say to interpret it. If the number is higher, it’s good for the currency, or bad for the currency, or expected to move prices lower or higher. Then go back and check how often that actually works. It’s basically 50/50. Don’t take my word for it — go study the data yourself.

So if it’s 50/50, what use is it?

You have to look at the technicals and ask the question I teach: who can be hurt the easiest? Where is the shortest line to pain where profit can be made?

When I look at charts, I’m looking at victims. I see stop-loss orders that are easy to take. I see inefficiencies that need to be revisited while still keeping the broader context or narrative intact — the kind of narrative normal retail traders would not expect because they’re looking at patterns, harmonics, Fibonacci ratios, animal patterns, Elliott Wave, and all this other stuff.

Yes, I understand harmonic trading. Yes, I understand Elliott Wave. I understand all that stuff. And when I look at charts, I can see how they’re wrong and when smart money will roll on them.

So instead of teaching you all the bullshit — Elliott Wave, harmonic patterns, and all that — I take you right to the narrative. The PD Array Matrix saves so much time because it avoids bogging you down. I’m getting right to the point every time I talk to you. The problem is that where I take you is uncomfortable. You want it to be easy. You want immediate understanding. But it isn’t like that.

The people who put in the work say, “Okay, I’m looking for one model. I’m looking for this type of trade. I’m going to simplify it by focusing only on this one thing.”

That could be the breaker. It could be the 2022 model. It could be the Silver Bullet, which now removes the question of when to look for it. It’s offered to you in the London session, the New York morning session, and the New York afternoon session. Three opportunities per day.

What are you doing with it?

Have you gone back through your charts and studied it the way I’ve been teaching you? If the fair value gap doesn’t form on the five-minute chart, drop to the four-minute. If it’s not there, drop to the three-minute. If it’s not there, drop to the two-minute. If it’s not there, drop to the one-minute. If it’s not there, drop to the 30-second or 15-second chart.

Whether you trade it or not, study it.

You’re training your brain. When you’re looking at price, your brain isn’t saying, “This is a 60-minute chart, so it only works on the 60-minute.” Your brain is seeing candlesticks, movement, fear, expectation, and uncertainty. It’s going up, it’s going down. You want it to go down, but every time it goes up you think, “It’s probably going to fail. It’s probably another losing trade. I have a stupid demo trade on and it’s going to be a loser. I’m wasting my time.”

That means you’re not doing it right.

You might be studying a lot and still doing it wrong. I’m tired of the same people moaning about being told they’re not working the right way. You have to work the right way. You have to follow the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, of course you won’t get the results.

You can join a gym, but if you never take your ass there, you’ll never get fit. Just showing up and listening to me talk doesn’t mean you’re lifting the weights. You’re not pushing. You’re not putting in the repetitions to the point of failure.

Most muscle growth comes from failure. You have to reach the point where you can’t do any more. That causes the damage, and the muscle says, “Okay, fuck this, I need to get stronger,” and it builds more muscle.

Your brain is the muscle in this. You have to build it. You have to go through the boring shit. You have to listen to lectures like this, where it sounds like I’m chewing your ass out. I don’t want you to see it that way. I want you to succeed.

It’s your perspective. If you come into this as a victim, you’re going to see everything as victimizing you.

The way I teach, you are victimizing the unlearned. You are victimizing the neophyte. They don’t know how to trade. They put their stop losses in the wrong place. We run on them.

We are not running in a pack like wild animals, chasing whatever moves next and reacting to price. Fuck that. We are cheetahs. We know we can run anything down. Put whatever method you want in front of us — we will run circles around it. Nothing can beat what I’m teaching you. Nothing.

You are a cheetah stalking in the high grass, and there’s a herd out there. They think they’re safe because they’re all close together, doing the same thing, eating the same grass, hanging around the same people, doing the same retail harmonic Elliott Wave bullshit.

You’re sitting in the long grass, waiting. You’re waiting and waiting until one animal steps just a little too far away and places its stop loss in the wrong place. Easy for the taking. The herd moves away, but that one animal doesn’t shift when it should.

Then there’s a fair value gap, and in seconds — 72 miles an hour — your ass is there.

That’s what I envision in price.

Do I know the person losing money? No. Do I know the person who had all their hopes and expectations tied to that trade? No. Am I going to see them? No. Am I worried about them? No. Do I feel bad that they lost money? No.

I have to eat. You have to eat. Everyone signs the same risk disclosures in this market. Everyone understands that you can lose, and lose more than you have. I have no qualms about it. That’s just the way it is.

It’s a jungle out here. You are either prey or predator.

I don’t walk around or teach my students to be lambs. You need teeth and claws, and you need to know when and how to use them. This is not about playing the nice guy role so everyone loves you and you never say anything wrong or off-color.

This is fucking war. We’re talking about money — real money, lots of it — and major entities out there do not want you doing this successfully. They’re going to roll on that, and I’m teaching you how to beat the fuck out of it consistently.

You’ll be able to walk in there every week. When you go to work, do you have to relearn your job every single week? No. You know what you’re doing. You’re bored. You can’t stand being there.

Trading needs to become like that.

Let’s say, for a moment, that you can determine the next draw on liquidity all by yourself, without me.

Wonderful. I’m proud of you.

That is the number one thing. If you can do that, you will always be able to find setups. But if you can see the draw on liquidity and you can see how trades form, yet you still can’t execute on them, how do you fix that?

Well, you don’t have a model yet. You only have familiarity.

You might say, “Okay, the market should be turning here.” Well, what do you do with that? What is price telling you?

Is there an order block? Is there a fair value gap? Is there a breaker? Is there an Institutional Order Flow Entry Drill? Is there an Optimal Trade Entry? Is there an Artemis pattern?

Oh, my — now the charter members know. Here comes a whole new wave of YouTube videos: “The ICT Artemis Trade — He Never Loses.”

That’s bullshit.

The people out there saying you never lose with Silver Bullet trades should not be saying that. That is false advertising. You are going to have losing trades. I never said you would never lose. But you can find consistency using the Silver Bullet because it is time-based, and it forms every single day.

The problem is that you want it to form on your favorite timeframe. You want it to fit your already established expectations or preconceived notions about what price should do. And when you don’t follow the rules, yes, you are doing it wrong, and you are not getting the results. That should be expected.

If I give you a recipe and say, “These are the ingredients, this is the order you use them in, and this is the result you should expect,” but then you substitute something, leave out a key ingredient, or replace it with what you think is better, you are not going to get the same result.

And don’t complain that you didn’t get the result I promoted if you’re doing something outside the scope of the instructions and parameters I gave you.

If you come to me as an educator and mentor, you’re trusting me enough to give me your attention initially. So why aren’t you following the rules I’ve placed in front of you?

You’re failing. Not me. You are.

So you have to change that. It’s always going to be you. When I mess up, I fail. Nobody’s fault but mine. That’s accountability. You have to be accountable to yourself.

Some people don’t want to be accountable. They want the luxury of blaming someone else because they messed up or didn’t do something correctly. But in this industry, guess what, Jack? You don’t get that luxury. It’s always you.

I don’t run a signal service. If you make money, congratulations. You did it right. Well done. I’m proud of you. If you lose money, eat that. What do I mean by “eat that”? Learn from it. It’s hard medicine. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it will make you better.

You think it’s always going to be the sugar highs that make you the best trader you’ll ever be? No. You’re going to learn from the cuts, the abrasions, the bruises, and the losses. That’s what I learned from, and that’s what you’re going to learn from too.

But you have to allow that to happen. You can’t tiptoe around thinking you’re going to avoid losing trades. You’re not. The more you try to avoid them completely, the more they’ll land right in your lap.

Every single time I blew out an account, it came on the heels of a good run. I wanted to feel good again because that feeling wore off too fast. I’d be walking around thinking, “Man, I made more money in this one trade than I make in a whole month at this bullshit job. If I just did that once a month, I wouldn’t even need a job.”

That felt great. Then it wore off, and I wanted to do it again. So you think you can just go back into the market and find that same thing again, forgetting that it took two and a half or three weeks for that price run to complete and reach its target.

Winning creates chemical imbalances in your brain too, and you don’t even know what that feels like yet because you haven’t done it consistently. You haven’t found consistency yet. And when you do reach that achievement, you’ll have a whole new level of learning to go through.

It is a learning process to grow accustomed to being profitable. That sounds strange. You’d think nobody would have a problem adjusting to profitability, but it’s weird. I don’t know how to articulate it in a way that fully makes sense until you experience it.

When you find consistency and profitability, it can feel like at any moment it’s going to stop working. Some of you already have that mindset. People ask me all the time, “Aren’t you afraid that by teaching this, the market is going to adjust to it?”

What do you mean, adjust to it?

This is the market. This is exactly what the market does. The market is not going to stop being what it is. You are who you are. You can say you identify as a dog, but you’re still a human being. The market can’t be something it isn’t. It’s not going to stop behaving this way.

I tell you all the time, quarterly, there is no way this is going to change. It’s never going to change. You doing it wrong? That will happen. You losing money by doing something incorrectly? That will happen.

But if you know how to trade and learn how to control yourself, a losing trade or two or three doesn’t end anything. You stop, recalibrate, get your bearings again, and go back to doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

You have to learn how to pause when you’re losing money, and pause when you’ve made money.

The people who succeed long term know when to sit still. That’s a very hard thing to teach. So I give general rules: when you have a really nice run, stop. Be content. Live there for a little while — even a whole week.

“But there are so many other trades.”

Yes, there are. The market is always moving. But if you insist on doing something simply because the opportunity is available, you’re ignoring the need to build mental capital.

That’s the point.

You can have whatever you want in your funded account or real account, but you’re not really trading with that. You’re trading with what you are mentally willing to lose. That’s the real threshold you don’t want to cross.

For example, let’s say you have a $10,000 account and you’re risking 2%. If you’re new, 2% is too high, but let’s use it for the example. In reality, you may become uncomfortable once the trade draws down 1%. So even though your stop is technically at 2%, when price approaches that 1% drawdown threshold, you collapse the trade.

So what is your real mental capital?

It’s 1%.

That’s your real risk tolerance. Have you considered that when you trade? Most of you probably haven’t. That’s a secret that unlocks performance you haven’t even dreamed of. Once you know your real threshold and accept it, you can trade around it properly.

That’s why I always say: be content with enough. Enough is going to be uniquely different for each of you. A $15,000 winning trade may not be significant for some people. For others, that’s a whole year. They’re done. They don’t need to do anything else.

It depends on your personal situation, expectations, and skill set.

The way you build mental capital is through experience. Even if you never took a trade on a move, in your journaling you record it like you saw it coming — because you did. You’re tricking your brain with pseudo-experience. You’re laying a psychological foundation, because this is where the battle is won. It’s not on the chart. It’s in your head.

You can easily talk yourself out of a winning trade. You can also talk yourself out of a short-term drawdown that would have paid out if you had simply stuck to the model.

How do you increase mental capital? You can’t deposit mental money. You build it through experience.

That experience factor is largely untouched in trading education. Mark Douglas didn’t talk about it enough. You have to fortify yourself between trades. When you’ve done something correctly, sit still. Feel what it feels like to be content. Don’t need the next trade immediately.

How do you know you’re ready to trade live funds or take a funded account challenge? When you’re not driven by the urge to get into the next trade.

If you’re the person who always tweets me after I call something and it delivers, asking, “What’s next? What’s it going to do next?” you’re not ready, bro. You are not ready. You’re acting like a fiend, like you’re out of rocks and looking for the next one.

The person who says, “Yeah, I’m going to take this week off,” even though the market may still move — that person has the right mindset. If they can forecast price action and still step away from the market even when they know something may be coming, that is maturity.

That discipline will serve you extremely well if you forge it before pressing into real money.

But many of you think it’s just the chart work. You think you need the new ICT gimmick, the new setup, the new model. It’s not that. I’ve already given you so much.

You are the missing final piece of the puzzle. And you don’t want to believe me because it’s painful.

I’m going to keep reminding you. Sometimes gently, and sometimes like this, where it probably hurts a little bit. Don’t hate the messenger. I’m Dr. ICT. I’m telling you this is the medicine you need. It doesn’t taste good, but it helps you. It makes you better.

And it’s important for you to grow and learn how to do this correctly without hurting yourself.

That’s why I teach in a demo.

I’m already loaded. I don’t need to prove to people that I’ve made money in the marketplace. I don’t need to do that. I’m calling it. My students are making money. This stuff happens. That’s all that needs to be known.

The only thing I promise is that you’re going to learn how to read price action. I did not promise you profitability. That is something you individually control.

But if I’m out here in public, in the role of educator, and I have no emotional hang-up about using a demo, then you should have no problem practicing in one. If your mentor is operating and teaching through the medium of a demo, don’t listen to these jokers out there who have something to sell, saying, “Oh, he does this and he does that.”

They’re not even doing anything close to what we do. Their whole month, I can do in one fucking day — from beginning to end, showing the whole history. Done. But I don’t need to do that. I don’t have a little debt complex. I’m completely content with who I am, how I am, and my own lane. I don’t need to worry about anything else.

So when you’re looking at this, don’t view demo trading as insignificant, because it is significant. You’re reading the same price action. The same price action unfolding in that demo is happening to people trading real money. The people trading real money who did the opposite of what you were expecting in price action, and lost their ass, know for fucking certain that it just happened to them.

I’m teaching you this way so you have no emotional connection to it. You have no emotional attachment, so you can’t be swayed during periods where it will do damage. You also can’t get egotistical, because you’re not making real money. You’re not getting taxed. You can’t go out and spend those demo dollars.

But you are getting experience.

You are allowing yourself to learn what I’m teaching you. When you get it right, pause. Feel what it feels like to get it right. Give your journal time between entries — between where you executed and your next trade.

I’m not trying to convince you to take trade after trade after trade just to fill your journal. That’s not what this is about.

It’s quality over quantity.

And just because I’m teaching you this skill set through the medium of day trading, it does not mean you should be trading every day.

If I’m not able to bridge that gap for you, then I’m not the best mentor. I’ve said this many times before: I’m not the best mentor.

I’m sure that in the years to come, someone will properly learn what I’m teaching and do a better job of coaching other people. But until I’m done, that can’t happen.

I’m doing the best I can. I have limitations as a person. I have things I wrestle with. I’m a real person, so I’m practical. I know I’m not going to reach all of you, and that hurts me, because I try very, very hard to do whatever I can to help you understand what you need to know and eliminate the things you’re worrying about.

It frustrates me when I see people not listening to sound advice — advice I wish I had been given. I would have paid whatever I had to learn the way I’m teaching you. I know what it was like because I lived it. I know 20-year-old Michael. I am that guy. If I had this, it would have done so much for me. It would have encouraged me when I needed it. It would have kept me aligned properly. It would have helped me control myself when I had no control.

When I lost, I wanted to get right back in. I wasn’t fearful once I learned certain methods of getting in; I was looking for them all the time, not understanding that the market has ebb and flow. There is time delivery to all of this. Unless you understand that, liquidity alone is not enough. It is essential, but it is not enough. You have to know how they use time, and that takes time to teach.

That’s why I tell everyone the minimum is a year, and even that is really just scratching the surface. Your best learning is going to be in years two through four. But you can still be profitable during that period, so don’t let that deter you. Don’t hear that as, “You can’t make money.” No — you can make money just from watching the 2022 YouTube playlist if you already have a general foundation in price action and trading.

If you’re familiar with trading and you go into that model, you can go right out of the gate and start finding profitability. I’m convinced of that.

But the problem is that a lot of people who come to me are greenhorns. They’re brand new — right out of the womb. “Here, make me a trader. I don’t know how to walk yet, but make me a trader.” For some of you, it is almost impossible to learn from me because I am not the beginning step.

I’ve wrestled with the idea of creating a baby-step ICT version — the basics of the basics — but I just don’t have the patience for that. I don’t have it in me to do that. So I’m not the beginning step.

In some ways, it’s actually better for you to go out there, mess up a little, and learn from doing something stupid with some other approach first. Then you’ll have experience to compare this against. You’ll be able to say, “Oh yeah, I would have placed my stop loss there,” or “I would have expected the market to go higher or lower there.”

Like I admitted to you: when I was in my twenties, I thought the Swiss franc was going to go up because I thought the weekly chart had a bullish flag. In reality, it was setting up a model I now teach today as a mega trade, and I couldn’t see it. My infancy as a trader hid it from me. I didn’t have the understanding. I didn’t have the experience.

But I saw a pattern. And because I was only looking for longs, I found what I wanted to find. If you look hard enough, if you torture the data and the numbers enough, they’ll submit to almost anything you want them to say.

That is the problem with this industry. That is why indicators look wonderful. Given enough time and a large enough sample set, any indicator can be made to show profitability. But when you walk forward with it, it doesn’t really work.

What I’m teaching you are elements of time, price delivery, algorithmic price delivery, macros, and the things that generalize delivery in price.

When should they form?

How do they form?

What does it look like?

Why should it take place?

Who is getting hurt by that price move?

Who stands to gain?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself.

The idea of “who stands to gain” requires you to personify the market. It is not one person. It is a collective entity I refer to as smart money.

They don’t make courses. You don’t know them. You don’t know their names. They are way above someone like George Soros, and they are employed by people you are never going to meet. They are in there taking the other side of the marketplace.

That is a segment of the market nobody really talks about. Some people hint at something similar — like a puppeteer or composite man — but not in the scope I’m talking about.

If you can personify the market that way, as an unseen entity you will never meet, and if that entity is cannibalizing market participants, then when you look at price right now, ask yourself: where would they be long? Where would they be short?

It’s easy to study in real time because you can see where the current price move originated. Did it take stops when it started? If it did not, then the move is probably unfinished and may need to go lower. If it did take stops, then look for inefficiencies or buy stops above the marketplace, because that is where price is likely to go.

Any timeframe. That is what I look at when I’m looking at price.

I’m not looking at Fibonacci ratios and fucking patterns. That is the distraction. That is the misdirection. You’re looking at the left hand while the right hand is doing the work. They’ll paint these charts — candlesticks, Heikin Ashi, Renko bars, point-and-figure, whatever the fuck you’re looking at — and you’ll try to figure out what it means. But all of that is distraction.

If you can simplify it and say, “Okay, this sounds Tom Clancy-ish, maybe it sounds like conspiracy theory, but it works,” then you can start seeing the market for what it is.

Because this is the market.

Look at the students who are doing really well. What are they doing? They have a model that they simplified using the concepts I taught.

You only need a reason to be bullish or bearish. Strip it down to the bare bones.

You go into the marketplace and ask: what do I want to focus on this week? Do I want to be bullish or bearish? What gives me confidence in that idea?

Go to the weekly chart. Is there a reason for price to expand higher? What would it need to reach for on the weekly chart to make a case for higher prices? If there is a valid case for the weekly chart to expand higher, then it stands to reason you will probably get at least one good bullish day on the daily timeframe.

And if that opportunity occurs around the time of a medium- or high-impact news driver, during that session, then you have probably narrowed your focus to a real opportunity in the marketplace.

That is not an everyday occurrence.

You need to warm up to the idea that you do not need to be in here every day. I am ICT. I created this stuff. This is my shit. And even I don’t need to be here every single day.

So if I’m the creator of these concepts and I’m not here every day forcing trades, what makes you think you have to live up to some challenge you created for yourself? Nobody gave you that challenge. You did. You placed Olympic-sized challenges in front of yourself with next to no experience, and you’re starting off on the wrong foot by doing that.

Less is more. Be content with enough.

If you are only making $1,000 a week in your first year or two, is that failure? I don’t see that as failure.

But if you start measuring yourself against everyone else — “This guy made $5,000. This person passed five accounts. This person got a $20,000 payout. This person got $3,000 every day this week” — what are you doing?

You’re minding someone else’s business.

And if you are minding someone else’s business, who is minding yours? No wonder you’re stressed. No wonder you’re not getting the results you’re looking for. You are not minding your own fucking business.

This is your business. This is your workshop. This is your storefront. This is your incorporation. You are incorporated.

If you aren’t focused on yourself, what you are doing, what you are not doing, and when to do it, nobody else is going to do that for you. I’m educating you, but I can’t do it for you. I can’t push you into a trade. I can’t pull you out of a trade. You are doing all of that.

You have to get comfortable in your own skin without me.

So instead of just listening to where I think price is going to draw, go into the charts and explain to yourself in your journal why I said those things. I’m giving you all those details. They are on YouTube, in my Twitter Spaces, and in my tweets. I didn’t hide it from you.

You have to condition yourself to see those things in old moves. These concepts didn’t just start working recently. We’ve been doing this for years. People watched me do this every single day behind a paywall. Every single day, I was expected to call it. Not as a signal service, but as a teaching process.

It still requires understanding and skill. You are being exposed to it. Take advantage of it while I’m here, because after November, you’re left with whatever I’ve taught. That’s it.

If you haven’t done the work of testing yourself, conditioning yourself throughout the year, studying what I’m teaching at the time, and going back through old moves to see whether those same things occur, then you’re missing the process.

When you do that work and you see that it really is there — that the gaps really do exist, that these setups really do present themselves — that’s the epiphany. That’s the aha moment.

Then you realize you can trade them when the opportunity presents itself, and you can do as little as five handles and still do well.

So why are you putting all this pressure on yourself? Why are you creating mountains of goals that nobody could realistically meet in the beginning stages of this? You don’t even know who you are as a trader yet.

You all have the capability to exceed your own expectations by a wide margin. But you first need to define what profitability means for you.

What is success to you?

When you reach a certain amount of money, what would you call success? When you first started trading, what was that number? It may have changed since then, but what was it in the beginning?

For those of you who are brand new, what is that goal? For some of you, it’s $100,000. For some of you, it’s $1 million. I can tell you, a million dollars is not a lot of money anymore. I spent literally $3.7 million in the last 11 months. It goes quickly. What used to be a million dollars is nothing now. A million dollars is like the new $50,000 from years ago.

But whatever your number is, don’t let me discourage you. If your goal is a million dollars, and you say, “If I make a million dollars, that’s success,” that’s fine. If your goal is $100,000, don’t let anything I say diminish that or make you feel embarrassed. If that is a lot of money to you, then it is a lot of money to you.

I’m asking because I want to know the listener’s expectation of success. What is the mile marker where you say, “I made money”?

There are people all around the world who will have very different definitions of success. Some will say $100 million or some crazy number. That’s a pipe dream. I’m not saying you can’t make it, but when people first come into trading, they usually aren’t expecting to make $100 million.

I’m asking what your goal was when you first got into this. What was the threshold where you said, “If I could do this, that would be success”?

If everyone is honest, you’ll see there are a lot of humble thresholds that, with what I’m teaching you, are realistically attainable. But what happens when you get there? Are you going to be satisfied? Are you going to stop trading because you hit that number?

“Oh, I’m done. I made my million dollars.”

No, you’re going to want to do more, especially if you’re young.

I’m old. Not an old man, but I’ve been doing this my entire adult life. I’m counting down how many more years I have. I don’t know, because tomorrow is not promised to any man.

But I have not been a good steward with my time with my family. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m going to unplug. I’m not interested anymore. I’ve done enough. I’m content with what I’ve done. I’m satisfied. I don’t need to do anything else in trading to feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I’ve done that.

Now I need to feel good about being the husband I should be, and the father I should have been but haven’t been. I allowed these markets to become a vampire and suck away my life force, attention, time, effort, and energy. They kept me from being what I should have been more toward.

Yes, I offered a better life for my family. I did all that. But it came at a cost, and I don’t want any of you to repeat that.

You can allow these markets to be a wonderful appendage to what you do in life. That is balance. I didn’t balance it correctly. I learned balance later, in my mid-40s. Before that, I had no concern about how my family would look because I thought, “They’ll be happy. I’m making a lot of money. I’m giving them a lifestyle. If they need something, they’ve got it.”

That was my rationale. But that is not good, because I wasn’t there for the dad moments I should have been there for.

If you are young and don’t have children yet, or even if you’re not young but you’re about to have children and you’re starting this journey, follow what I put out in the 1440 series. You’ll hear my heart there. In that series, where I talked about what I would tell my younger self, I exposed my heart to all of you.

I can honestly tell you I was afraid to put it on YouTube because it was raw. I spoke from my heart, saying things most men probably wouldn’t admit to. We want to walk around like we have total confidence and any woman can be with us because we’re the man, because we’re Mr. Everything, the Chad.

But in reality, when you have children, your life is not yours anymore.

And I did not do the right things. I spent too much time pursuing this and not being the dad. It’s unfortunate, but hopefully I still have time now to pursue things and make memories with them.

You can have a lot of money. You can be a person of influence in this industry and still be a fucking failure as a family person. And I was a failure. I was not doing the things I should have been doing. I spent way too much time doing all this.

It was my passion, but the words don’t reach far enough for me to feel satisfied explaining it. All I know is this: you can think you’re successful because you make a lot of money, because you have nice things, because you can afford things, because you don’t worry about the cost of living — and still not be happy. Still not be satisfied. Still be regretful.

If you do the things I did wrong, you’ll feel the same discomfort I feel.

I know some of you probably think I’m happy right now, kicking back, enjoying everything. But I have a lot of regret. I wish I had done simple things that didn’t cost anything except time and attention toward my kids and my wife. If I had done more of those things, I wouldn’t feel the guilt I feel now.

I have the money, but that doesn’t compensate for it. My family knowing we have that money doesn’t compensate for it.

This weekend, my kids told me, “This is awesome, Dad, being able to spend time with you like this. We never had this before.” And I broke down crying in the restaurant. I’m appreciative that they recognize it, but it hurts. I don’t want to tell them not to say that, because they should tell me. They are entitled to tell me that. I need to hear it.

But you don’t want to be where I am right now, hearing it this way, when you could simply plan your life better.

Success can be had without becoming a monster in it. I was trying to devour my entire life through this.

For those constantly reaching out to me saying, “Please don’t stop doing what you’re doing in November,” you need to understand why I need to stop. If you respect me, then respect why I’m doing it.

I can make lots of money. I can make mentorships. I can make books. I can make courses. I can blow that YouTube channel up, advertise every year, and become the biggest name in this industry.

I don’t want it.

It didn’t do anything for me as a family man. At the end of the day, I have to look my children in the face. I have to look at my wife. And yes, they may smile and say, “I love you, Dad,” but behind that, there are so many open voids of time where I was not there — and I was in the house with them.

Do you want to hear that from your children?

Do you want to look at your wife when she says, “I love you,” and know she’s reaching to say, “You are the man I love. You are the person I married. You are the father of our children. I appreciate this time with you now, but I have to appreciate it so much because I don’t know if you’re going to go right back into doing what you’ve done for your entire adult life”?

Trust me when I tell you, you don’t want to feel that.

Fast cars and big bank accounts do not compensate for it.

A lot of people who write books won’t tell you that, because they didn’t get rich. They’re making money from book sales. They’re selling books because they need to sell that book.

I’m walking away from this at the biggest point of my career as a mentor and teacher, with all the hype around me right now. And I’m uncomfortable with it. I’m genuinely uncomfortable.

A lot of people have asked me to speak publicly. I’m not going to drop names, but I’m shy. I don’t want to be like that. I can talk like this and pour my heart out to you because you’re not sitting next to me.

If you were training one-on-one with me, I wouldn’t talk about these things. I would talk about the markets and the difficulty. But I probably wouldn’t tell you where I messed up as a husband, as a dad, and as a real human being.

I failed miserably.

Pour yourself into the content. Study it. Make it yours.

And then don’t forget me. Shoot me an email at innercircletrader@gmail.com. I would love to see your testimony. I would love to see what you’re doing.

I get so many of them every single week. People from all around the world reach out and say, “This is what I’m able to do. This is what I’m doing with it.” They’re paying for communities in impoverished nations to be fed. They’re putting wells in places where people don’t have drinking water.

That’s the stuff I’m talking about.

Not, “I bought this Lamborghini,” or “I bought this McLaren,” or “I bought this house,” or “I live in a new part of the world because of you. Thank you.”

Yeah, that’s great. God bless you for that. But I want to know what you’re doing with it to help other people. That’s what I want to see.

I want to see you contributing to people who don’t have it.

So, you want to strip everything down and make a simple model out of it.

You need something to justify why you are bullish or bearish. You derive that from the weekly chart. Then you look at the daily chart for liquidity or inefficiencies. Where is price likely to reach within that weekly chart expansion — either higher or lower?

If you can find something that agrees with your expectation on the weekly chart, that gives you context.

What does that mean?

If you are bullish, it means you believe the weekly candlestick — either the one forming in the coming week or the current week that has not completed yet — is likely to reach up into some kind of inefficiency, like a weekly fair value gap above the market, or it is likely to trade above a weekly high where buy stops are resting.

Which is more likely: price going up for one of those two reasons, or price going down for one of the bearish equivalents?

If you are bearish, you would look for an old low or a fair value gap below current market price on the weekly chart.

It sounds oversimplified because, if you are too new, you may not yet know what you’re looking for. But for people who have been studying price action, it becomes easier to discern which is more likely: is price likely to go up for one of those two reasons, or go down for one of those two reasons?

Whichever one is more likely, that becomes your macro bias.

That is not your daily bias. Your daily bias must be derived from the daily chart.

For instance, if we have a really large move lower on Monday, but our weekly expectation is still for upside expansion, then what are we expecting on Tuesday or Wednesday? We want to see something reverse and go higher. But that Monday move does not automatically change our bias.

Most traders looking at one daily candle would think, “Okay, that big Monday candle is the beginning of the move for the rest of the week.” But that is generally not what happens, especially when we are expecting a specific weekly objective to be reached.

So the weekly chart gives us the macro perspective, the higher-timeframe perspective. Then we use the daily chart, along with the economic calendar, to zero in on a medium- or high-impact news driver.

Around that time of day, that is when the manipulation starts.

After the initial manipulation, we wait for displacement. An imbalance forms. A fair value gap forms.

When will it form?

Between 10:00 and 11:00. Between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon. Or during the London session.

There are three opportunities every trading day. One of them forms in every market, inside one of those time windows or kill zones.

The weekly chart is what we use for bias, or macro perspective. Are we bullish or bearish?

Then we use the daily chart in conjunction with the economic calendar. So if the economic calendar shows, for instance, that Tuesday or Wednesday has a medium- or high-impact news driver, then we know there is likely to be manipulation on that specific day.

Around that time, we go in with a narrative in mind: they are going to use that initial manipulation to trick traders into the wrong direction. It’s like a Judas swing.

If you want to strip it down to the bare bones and build one simple model, I can teach it like this. This is not the only way to do it, but it is a simple way.

We use the weekly chart for the macro bias. Then we use the daily chart with the economic calendar. Then we move to the lower timeframes — four-hour and one-hour — to study market structure and identify key levels. From there, we measure swings and look for low-hanging-fruit objectives.

When we time the market, we can use the Silver Bullet as the model of choice. But it could also be as simple as an Optimal Trade Entry. It could be the 2022 model. Any one of those can form inside the Silver Bullet time windows — those 60-minute intervals where your focus is reduced to one single hour.

If you know there is a medium- or high-impact news driver, then you know those days are going to be easier for a Silver Bullet to form.

Where do you start looking for it?

Start on the five-minute chart. If it’s not there, go down to the four-minute chart. If it’s not there, go to the three-minute, then the two-minute, then the one-minute. If it doesn’t exist on the one-minute chart, either let it go if you don’t want to use seconds charts, or go down to the 30-second or 15-second chart. Don’t go lower than 15 seconds.

That is where it will form.

It is a high-frequency trading entry mechanism when you’re using the seconds chart, but the criteria is built from the weekly and daily charts, specifically focusing on a day with a high-impact news driver. You’re waiting for the initial displacement and manipulation.

And you only trade between 10:00 and 11:00. The entry must be taken in that window. If it isn’t, you wait for the next session. You missed the move, or it may form in the afternoon session, or it may have already formed in the London session.

Those are the rules.

It’s simple, but if you’re undisciplined, you won’t stick to it. You’ll say, “I can’t do that. I can’t follow that.” But if you do follow it, it can give you consistency. You will still take losses, but it gives you a logical framework for finding setups.

You can time it with the economic calendar. You can look ahead and see next month’s calendar. The reports are already scheduled. So you know, “Okay, there may be opportunity on that day.”

The idea of not knowing when the setup forms is canceled. I’ve told you where, when, and why.

What about all the other moves that occur on other days, or intraday moves that are opposed to the weekly objective? You ignore them. You filter them out.

That’s what I was really getting at on Friday. Every long was pretty much good. There were some longs where I should have taken more partials, or closed the trade and not gone short. But I showed you both directions — up, down, up, down.

The longs were better. Why? Because the weekly volume imbalance was the real draw on liquidity.

If you want to be really nimble and take five handles when it’s available, you can do that. I could have done that up, down, up, down all day on Thursday. But your focus should be quality over quantity.

Your goal should not be, “I can take 12 trades intraday and make them all profitable.” That is not something you should strive for. You want to be consistently profitable and content with waiting for the best setups — the cream of the crop — so you can trust them.

When you can do that, you are exhibiting discipline and self-control, which most traders do not have.

The way you arrive there is by having a clearly defined model.

What are you looking for? What does it look like? When does it occur consistently?

If the markets were truly random, how would the Silver Bullet setup even be possible? Why would it be so consistent?

Because the markets are not random. They are controlled. They are coded. They are run by an algorithm. And because it is coded and algorithmic, it has to do certain things.

We are waiting for the time when manipulation would occur, whether it is automated as part of the algorithm or caused by manual intervention. We wait for displacement.

Sometimes, we will fall victim to trades that are manually intervened. A setup will form, you’ll enter, you’ll follow all the rules, and then suddenly the market turns back and stops you out. But nothing really changed. It was just another run on liquidity. Your stop was too early. Your entry was too early. Then you have to re-enter.

How do you develop that experience?

By studying old moves, and by not abandoning the entire premise just because you were stopped out. If I get stopped out, I ask: did anything actually change? If no, and it simply ran my stop, then no problem — I can go back in.

Sometimes, as a human being, you’re going to do it wrong. But you need the experience to recognize when the market still has the opportunity to do what you expected in the beginning, even though you took a loss.

There will also be times when you see the market morph into something extremely bullish or bearish. You watched me do that on Friday. The market went down while I was already long several contracts. It traded one more time into a level I believed was a reclaimed PD array. I knew that was the one I was waiting for. There was no doubt in my mind. I added a larger position, and it turned right there and ran away.

That is experience.

You can’t get that from a book. Even if I wrote it, you still couldn’t get it that way. You can’t get it from a five-minute video, whether I make it or someone else tries to reduce it down. Even if I teach a whole week-long lecture on it, it still needs to be experienced individually.

And that’s the part nobody wants to hear.

“I can make it faster for you.”

That’s bullshit.

You can’t compress what has to be learned on an individual basis. You can’t. That bandwidth is uniquely experienced. You can’t change it, augment it, speed it up, or stretch it out. It is what it is.

That’s what makes this industry expensive — not simply because you can lose money, but because it takes a tremendous amount of effort and time. And you bring all your baggage to it: your character flaws, the things you don’t like about yourself, the things that would unsettle you if you were forced to really look at them.

Some people don’t like who they discover themselves to be. That manifests in losing. They don’t want to go through it and grow through it. They would rather turn their cheek and say, “This guy is a fraud. This stuff doesn’t work. Nobody makes money trading.” That narrative lets them continue living without correcting their own problems: impatience, impulsiveness, greed, laziness — lazy-fuckingness, whatever.

Lazy doesn’t work here, folks. Lazy doesn’t work.

And impatience won’t allow you to stay in this game long enough to learn. You have to be patient. You have to be very disciplined with your time.

For someone new listening to this industry, maybe this is your first time hearing me. I’ve probably talked about things that mean nothing to you, and maybe you’ll close this in a couple minutes when I end it — if you’ve even stayed that long. Many people will hear something like this and come away thinking it was a waste of time.

But if you haven’t traded with your own money, and you haven’t found consistency yet, it’s probably because you still believe there’s something out there that will be easy: one, two, three, quick understanding, no mistakes, no character flaws to fix, no losing trades. Believe me, when I first started, I believed that kind of thing had to exist too.

You may not admit it publicly, but deep down, that’s what you’re looking for. You believe it’s out there. And maybe you think, “ICT is probably the closest thing to it, but if he found this, there must be someone else out there who has it even better, shorter, easier.”

I’m being honest with you: the things I tell you I can’t teach you, nobody else can teach you either.

You learn them through experience. You lose, and you learn from that.

How can I adequately teach you how to fix a $25,000 drawdown with real money? How could I put that in a book, a video, or a video series? Even if I went into a live account, purposely lost $25,000, and then said, “Now here’s how I’m going to fix it,” you still couldn’t fully understand it unless it was your $25,000.

You have to experience certain things.

There is a whole learning curve here that most people tiptoe around and pretend will all be fine. It won’t. The most valuable lessons often come from pain and losing.

I love when people — whether they use my content or not — are candid with their audience and say, “I’m really having a hard time with this. I lost here. This is what I did wrong.” I have the utmost respect for someone like that, because that is reality.

Anyone can go out there with hindsight-Harry mentorship-level bullshit and talk about what already happened. It can sound educated, and people may think, “Oh, he or she should be able to do that live.” But they never do it. They never call it live. They won’t trade it. They won’t record executions.

They build their name on horseshit for clout.

The people who are really out there in the trenches — whether they’re teaching or simply sharing their experience on YouTube — are the ones worth paying attention to.

Take a look at what is promoted in this industry — whether it’s Forex, futures, crypto, or whatever the fuck it is.

Everybody promotes the rich lifestyle. That’s all they have to show. They don’t show anything else.

If I lose, I’m going to show you how I lose. If I get it wrong, I’m not going to sugarcoat it or tap dance around it. I’ll say, “Okay, I did that wrong. Boom, boom, boom — this is what I’m doing now.”

How often am I doing it incorrectly? I’m telling you what’s going to happen, and then it does. But you saw on Friday, I took a $975 hit. It didn’t do shit to me.

Bringing the element of humanity into it will grow your channel.

In your trading, what was the biggest boulder? What was the barrier or roadblock in your understanding? What are you still under pressure from, or what have you overcome?

Preferably, I’d love to hear from those who have overcome something and what they did to overcome it, because you’re going to see that everyone is dealing with unique issues. Everyone has different reasons for why they feel stuck.

And if they’re honest — and honestly, I don’t expect the level of honesty I’d like to see — I’m encouraging you all to open up the same way I’ve opened myself up.

When I do these talks, and in certain YouTube video series, you’ve heard me cry. I’m a fucking man, and I’m a human being. I have a heart. When I think about the things I’ve done, how I caused my family to miss me while I was right there in the same house, passing by them like a ghost just to get back to my charts — I caused that pain. I did that. I regret it. I can’t fix it. The only thing I can do now is spend more time with them.

For you, it might be fear. Fear of losing. What did you do to overcome that? It might be fear of entering a trade, fear of not getting out at the right price, or something else entirely. I’m just giving examples.

I’m not saying, “Use this to make a video and pretend to be honest because people will love it.” No. But if you have the balls to do it, and you go out there honestly and say, “This is what I dealt with for this long,” or, “This is what I’m still encountering, even though I can make money,” I promise you, your community will love you for that.

They will love you because you’re not trying to be a superstar, rockstar, celebrity trader who knows everything.

I don’t do that. And I’m that guy, but I don’t present myself that way. I’m real. When I mess something up, I’ll tell you: “I fucked that up. I didn’t do that right. This is what I had to learn from it.”

That’s real mentoring. That’s someone who went through real shit, learned from it, and is showing you how to avoid it and why you shouldn’t do those things.

Because you’re not going to be the exception. You’re not going to be the person who can say, “Well, it didn’t happen to me.” So many young guys do the same shit I tell them not to do and then say, “Yeah, I’m just like ICT,” like it’s some kind of brotherhood.

No. I don’t want you to do that. I know that pain. I know the scar tissue it leaves. It will limit you.

If you do the things I tell you to do and avoid the things I tell you to avoid, you can be better than I am. Even by trading just one model I created, you can be better than I am.

How is that possible?

Number one: I’m never satisfied with my exits. Never. I am never, ever satisfied with them. I don’t care how much money I make from them. I’m never satisfied with my exits.

My entries, unless I say otherwise, are pretty much where I want to get in. But my weakness is my exits. I’m not content. I want more precision on my exits. You may look at what I’m doing and think, “Dude, if I could have just 25% of that, I’d be happy.” But I’m not.

That’s an issue I have. I wrestle with it every day. When markets aren’t trading and I’m thinking about what I can do to improve, what ideas I want to pursue, or what I want to tweak, it’s always the exit strategies.

Entries are unlocked for me. I have no fear of getting into anything. I said I have 81 different ways to get into something. Trust me, I’m getting in. If it’s a vault, I’m getting in it, and I’m taking something out. It may not be all of it, but I’m taking something.

The people who hate me can’t stand the fact that I’ve been teaching with a demo. And I’m blowing up with a demo.

I’ve shown live trading. I made something like $25,000 in one month flipping a quarter — flipping a fucking quarter — and doing a few things for students in my private mentorship who asked me questions like, “Can you do this? How do I fix this? How did I do that?”

And I made $25,000.

Go through all those trade executions, and you won’t see any of the models or things I’ve taught you. They’re not there. That was just managing money. If you know how to manage money, you can flip a coin and make money. That was the proof.

If I were in a courtroom, I’d say, “Here’s what I did. I flipped this thing. If it was heads, I bought. If it was tails, I sold.” And I forced myself to do that. That’s it. It’s all still there.

So what do you think happens when you apply sound money management, good risk-reward, and choose your setups based on the logic I’m teaching? Your results are about as close as you can get to a guarantee over a large sample set.

Not every individual trade will be a win. But over a large sample set, you can reasonably expect a positive outcome.

Now, a person coming in with mental baggage can’t expect that, because whether they realize it or not, they’re going to do things subconsciously, inadvertently, or directly to derail themselves.

You’re angry at your wife. You’re angry at your husband. You don’t feel like you’re getting enough attention from them. You’re going to act out.

Someone pissed you off at work. You didn’t get recognized at work. You got fired. Someone did something to your child at school and now you want to go out there and make the news. That’s real-world shit.

And if you’re in a trade, or you go into a trade to compensate for that and give yourself a different feeling — to feel better about the situation you’re in — then you’re not really trading. You’re using the market as emotional medication.

Maybe you think, “If I can make 500 bucks, that’s better than wanting to go out there and hurt this person who did something to my kid.” Whatever it is that the real world brought to you — discomfort, boredom, rage, anger, insignificance, lack of attention from your partner — if you let that push you into a trade, you’re in trouble.

If boredom invites you into taking a trade, and you think, “Let me just do something in the market right now,” you’re going to fuck around and find out.

Do you fall into that impulsiveness all the time? Do you do it frequently? These things may sound silly, and some of you may think, “I would never do that.” But that is what it’s like to be human.

Intrusive thoughts come in. And if you allow those intrusive thoughts to dictate your direction or execution when real money is at risk, are you really trading? Or are you doing a science experiment?

It’s like taking chlorine and mixing it with brake fluid. The average person may not know what happens, but you don’t want to do that. It can violently catch fire.

And that’s what you’re doing psychologically.

You’re starting with something good and clean: trying to improve your life through trading. That’s the chlorine. But then you bring in brake fluid — the emotional baggage that stops you from following rules, or pushes you to do something the rules say you shouldn’t do. When those two things combine, the good intention catches fire violently.

Ignorance doesn’t exonerate you from the damage caused by fucking around and finding out.

So when you allow intrusive thoughts from your personal life — pain, discomfort, boredom, rage, anger, insignificance, lack of attention from your significant other — to influence your trading, you’re setting yourself up for damage.

Human beings have a tendency to do that. I’ve been open about what I’ve done in the past, where I hurt myself. I caused monetary loss, scar tissue, and mental baggage that I still wrestle with today.

There are certain times when I get into the marketplace and I’m reminded of a past trade. Not because I want to remember it, but because I’ve done so many trades that a certain setup or condition reminds me of a time I did something wrong. My mind shifts to that bad moment, and I lose concentration on what I’m actually looking for.

That is scar tissue.

It’s like eating a steak and getting a piece of meat stuck between your teeth. If you don’t have floss, your tongue keeps going back to it. You can’t really listen to someone talking to you. You’re nodding and saying, “Yeah, I hear you,” but all you’re doing is trying to get that little piece of meat out.

That’s what scar tissue is like in trading. Bad experiences keep pulling your attention back to where you were hurt before. Then you can’t focus clearly on the trade you’re actually in.

That’s why I teach the way I teach, using a demo account. I don’t want you to develop that problem. If you already have it, you’re probably nodding right now because you know exactly what I’m talking about. You wish you had known this beforehand.

But once you have that scar tissue, you have to live with it. It makes trading harder.

The way I teach, with demo trading, prevents you from developing that problem in the first place.

People are making money by learning from me, studying in their own demo accounts, and getting comfortable with what they’re looking at. They wrestle through their own bullshit, identify their character flaws, and then honestly decide whether they need a coping skill to work around it or whether they need to correct it.

It might be substance abuse. It could be alcoholism. It could be smoking weed. If you’re smoking weed and trading, you’re fucking stupid. You’re dulling your senses and making this harder on yourself.

If you want to do that, do it on the weekend — when there are no markets and no way to hurt yourself in the marketplace. If you’re going to get high, get lit, get baked, whatever you want to call it, do it when you can’t damage yourself trading.

You shouldn’t smoke anyway; it’s going to tear up your lungs. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s hurting your lungs. Edibles are different, but alcohol is another issue. You don’t want to be drinking, and you don’t want alcohol anywhere near you while you’re trading.

I don’t drink. I’ve never drunk alcohol or gotten drunk, but I’ve seen the effects of it. And in my opinion, nobody is going to trade effectively while intoxicated. This is not the arena for that. Trying to be the person who proves me wrong there is stupid.

So it might be something extreme like that, or it might be something as simple as wanting to feel significant. Maybe you’re impatient and want to do something right away because a win would make you feel important.

And most of the time, for men, it’s that.

For women, many times it’s wanting to feel confident that they don’t have to rely on a secondary income. That allows them to live in their relationship with their significant other more honestly.

Unfortunately, some women are codependent on a man because he is the breadwinner. If he helps keep the household afloat and they don’t have enough to support themselves without him, they may stay in relationships they otherwise wouldn’t stay in. I’m not trying to push divorce or separation, but some relationships are not healthy. They may be physically abusive, mentally abusive, or simply toxic, and they feel trapped.

This skill set, once learned, gives them the ability to weigh whether the relationship is truly healthy.

And honestly, if you want to know whether a man truly loves you, if you can make enough money to support the household and you still respect him as the man, he’s going to love you like a queen. Because he’ll know, “She doesn’t need to be with me. She makes real money, and she still chooses me. She is monogamous with me. She could be somewhere else, but she chooses me.”

How’s that for a life lesson?

Young men need to think about that, because a lot of times you’re thinking with your dick. Women aren’t thinking about your dick the way you think they are. They may manipulate you with it. Maybe you never thought I’d go here, but this is the reality, folks.

People are human. Relationships are manipulated. Sometimes we pretend we’re in love just to cope. But when you start making real money, it may open your eyes. Do you really love the person you’re with? Or are you just codependent? Are they really loving you the way you should be loved?

Because if you’re not bringing anything to the table, I can tell you that many men do not view women as equal in a relationship. They think women should be subordinate all the time, and that’s unfortunate because it makes the relationship lopsided.

Subservient women, almost to a fault, will stay in that codependent relationship. But if you have the ability to make this kind of money independently of your spouse, it will force him to rise to the occasion and become a better man. Or you can escort him out the door and say, “I don’t really need you. You’re holding this family unit back. You’re welcome to be part of this family, and I want you to be part of this family, but if you’re going to be toxic or unwholesome, we don’t need you. We don’t need your paycheck.”

A real man would see that and say, “This is a queen. This is a woman I want to be with. This is someone I should love and treasure. I have her right now, and I have not been treating her like that.”

That’s how I feel. I’m talking straight from my heart right now.

Do a better job of balancing your personal life.

That is the whole reason I put the 1440 video series out. It is not filler. That is valuable information I wish I had learned in my 20s. If I had, I would have been much more effective, much more fluent, more successful, and much more at peace. I would not have created all of this anxiety for myself.

Success is easy to get.

It is hard to manage if you are not prepared for it mentally. It is very, very hard.