Trading & The Seasons In Success

Date: 2026-08-22

ICT audio archive

Trading & The Seasons In Success

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All right, it’s been a while since I did a solo show, huh?

Obviously, it’s Saturday, so there’s nothing really going on market-wise. But I just wrapped up a video review of Friday’s session, where I answered a couple of questions that probably won’t seem important if you’ve been around me for a while. Sometimes I still have to address them because, like today, Joker comes out and makes a video—which is fun.

Marketplace phases and profiles

[02:50] I love it. That’s how I got where I am. I reached two million subscribers because people talked about me.

Now, I want you to think about the slide I tweeted. I originally shared it in the 2016 paid mentorship, and it covers the four phases of the marketplace—how price is delivered and booked.

Think about how those four phases correlate with individual sessions and day-to-day trading, moving from one Daily Profile to the next. Whatever happened in the previous session, ask yourself: how did it fit within those four phases?

[03:26] You also need to learn how to anticipate when you’re likely to encounter problematic conditions, because obviously you want to be successful. Everyone wants to be successful when they’re reading price action.

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you’ve proven to yourself that you can successfully follow a methodology—whether it’s mine or someone else’s doesn’t matter. Once you become confident enough to risk your own money, you still want success. In fact, you want it even more.

[04:00] But there are seasons to success, much like there are four seasons in the calendar year.

Thankfully, we’re coming to the end of summer. I can’t stand summer, to be honest with you. I’m looking forward to fall and then the colder months.

Seasons of trading success

[06:22] You don’t want that to happen. You want to see spring. You want to see the vibrant regrowth of your equity.

Unfortunately, most people who start trading with live funds—real money—forget that winter is coming. They don’t prepare for what they experienced during the fall, when the leaves were falling off that money tree. They don’t learn from those mistakes or recognize the character flaws manifesting themselves in their behavior as traders. Instead, they keep making the same poor decisions.

[07:12] They stop following the rules they originally outlined for themselves: “This is my model, and I’m only going to trade when it does these things. If price does anything outside these parameters, I’m not taking a trade.”

But then there you are on a Friday, trying to force something your model doesn’t even call for.

You want to experience the joy of the holidays. You want trading to feel like Christmas: “I’m making all this money.” That’s what you got into trading for.

[07:47] You want to make your family happy. You want to be the Santa Claus of your own household, and that’s admirable. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But the reality is that most people are eventually met with a long, cold winter because they never learned from the mistakes they made right out of the gate. They thought summer trading was going to stay hot forever.

Miami Heat. It’s going to be awesome. Pretty girls, handsome young men, fancy cars, and fine dining.

[08:25] Somehow, it doesn’t work out that way, does it? Not for most people. For some, sure—it does. I’m not going to say it never happens, but for the majority, it doesn’t.

The ones who survive are the ones who learn from the mistakes they made during their initial soiree into the marketplace. They went out into that summertime rave of price action—the thunderous beat, the volatility, the excitement—and they wanted to chase the vibe.

[09:08] Then fall comes, and your equity falls with it. That passion you had starts turning into a long, cold December, January, and February where you second-guess everything.

“Why did I even get into this? My family and friends were right. I shouldn’t have been doing this.”

You start doubting everything that originally excited you.

But you’re simply looking at it the wrong way because you went out of spec. That’s part of the season of success.

Anyone who has found real success in any industry, if they’re honest, will tell you about the seasons they went through.

[10:08] I like listening to the ones who admit, “You know what? I went through deserts. I spent a lot of time in the valleys while wanting to be on the mountain peak.”

They wanted to see things nobody else got to see. They wanted to make the kind of money most people never make, achieve consistency most people never experience, and develop the accuracy and precision everyone wants.

But over time, they learned that those things don’t happen immediately.

Build analyst skills first

[10:46] The people who actually learn from their mistakes start dialing down the leverage, lowering their expectations, and removing arbitrary timelines from success.

“I have to be successful by this date. I have to make this much money by then. I have to quit my job by this year, or my family and friends will think I’m a failure.”

That thinking has to go.

If everything you’re doing is centered around learning how to trade and apply sound analytical concepts, then the first question is:

How much time have you spent learning to become a great analyst?

[11:23] Because that’s the requirement. You have to become a good analyst first.

I’m not impressed by people who make a lot of money quickly. Those things can happen.

What matters is longevity—the ability to find success and stay there through every season in the sun.

When this is done, I’ll post the link and you’ll be able to watch the video. It’s about 30 minutes long.

For those who learn from their mistakes early on, eventually they get to experience spring—the season where your equity comes back to life.

[12:40] New growth appears. Dead things come back to life. Trees begin bearing fruit. And since all of us are trying to cultivate, nurture, and fertilize our own money tree, that’s exactly what we’re looking for in the springtime.

It just so happens that spring is also one of the key times of the year when trading tends to be very robust.

But you have to remember that the summer you started with is coming around again.

Are you going to make the same mistakes?

Are you going to say, “I don’t want to listen to these guys telling me not to trade during the summer doldrums. Don’t trade every single day in the summer? These guys are fools. Look what I just did today.”

[13:28] You feel good. You beat your chest. You feel like you can conquer anything. You become so confident that you start talking about other people and talking down to them.

Then reality smacks you upside the head. And you go through it. Those are humbling moments. Everybody experiences them. That’s another season—another part of the road to success.

[14:05] If you got into this thinking it was going to be a one-way street—easy driving, no traffic in front of you, no tolls to pay, no bad weather, no potholes, no bugs hitting your windshield—just roll the top down, baby, and everything will be fine the whole way, you’ve probably had a rude awakening by now.

When you go through those experiences, those minor setbacks—because that’s all they are—you can’t say, “I blew an account. I can’t afford this.”

[14:45] Well, then you shouldn’t have been trading. There’s your answer right there.

You have to be able to afford to do this. If you can’t afford it, then you’re not a trader. You’re hoping and praying. You’re a gambler. You’re a lottery trader. You’re a scratch-off trader, hoping that what you do is equivalent to taking a quarter and scratching the film off a lottery ticket: “I hope I win. If I don’t, I’ll still play, but I hope I win.”

That’s a gambler.

[15:17] That’s a lottery mentality.

You would be wise to study the people who are very outspoken on X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube—all the social media platforms. You can pick up on who the bullshit artists are. You can see it.

These are people who don’t learn from their mistakes. They keep masking them. They keep hiding them behind personas. The worst thing you can do is try to emulate me or anyone else.

[16:08] When we’re pursuing success, we naturally try to latch onto someone we respect, and that’s admirable. I understand it.

I had—and still have—a tremendous amount of respect for Larry Williams. I simply believe I’ve outgrown his analytical concepts, and that’s not a knock against him or anyone else.

You have to find something that makes sense to you. That’s another season in success, and sometimes it requires the painful pruning of people you once looked up to as heroes.

You have to be able to say, “I’m thankful for the time I spent with you.”

[16:54] “I learned from you. I gained insight from you. I grew as a person, as an analyst, and as a trader. But my time with you has come to an end. I still respect you, but I can no longer subscribe to your views. I can’t remain tethered to you.”

That’s a season in success, and all of you should eventually want that with me.

Instead of staying tethered to me and constantly trying to get something more from me, you should become more excited about the discoveries you’re making in your own hands with the things I’ve already taught you.

[17:35] That’s the goal. It’s not about constant interaction between us. That’s fun, I understand, but it’s winding down.

If you’re not preparing for a time when there is no ICT—when there’s no daily engagement and the videos simply stop coming—then you’re going to struggle. You’ll need your own motivation and your own stimulation to keep doing this.

Over the next two years, I’m sure there are going to be many more millionaires. There are already plenty you never hear about.

[18:20] They don’t care. They don’t care what other people think. They don’t care about telling everyone they’ve made it. They don’t care. And they’re not going to spend their money trying to prove it.

For everyone listening to this—even if you’re hearing the recording tomorrow or sometime down the road—I would love to see a tweet directly to me if you reach seven figures.

And I don’t mean calling yourself a seven-figure trader because you’re trading seven figures of prop firm leverage. That’s not a seven-figure trader to me.

[18:58] Seven figures means you have seven figures in your account that you can actually withdraw in cash. That’s a seven-figure trader.

And that’s no knock against my students who like to use that term. But let’s be real. If you’re trading seven figures of prop firm leverage, you’re not a seven-figure trader. The same applies to everyone outside our community. But it looks good, doesn’t it?

That’s another season in success. You want to portray yourself as stronger than the hand you actually hold. You want to act like you’ve got the high hand—the royal straight flush in spades, baby.

[19:35] Can’t beat it. Can’t beat it. That’s a season of success. In the old days, they called it “fake it till you make it.”

When you’re journaling, though, you do need a form of that. You have to encourage yourself. You have to tell yourself that you saw something correctly because you’re conditioning your mindset, developing an internal dialogue using the same language, and convincing your subconscious that you can do this.

Because your subconscious is the part of you that’s going to say, “You can’t do it.” You may not hear it until you’re about to press the button.

[20:15] Or it’ll start talking as soon as your first trade goes against you. Maybe your first tape-reading idea fails, your first demo trade loses, or your analysis doesn’t pan out at all.

That’s your subconscious—the self-defeating part of you that wrecks you all the time. You have to overcome it, subdue it, wrestle it into submission, and tell it, “Shut up. You have no reason to be talking right now. You don’t have any experience doing this, so why are you talking to me?”

[20:48] So yes, in the beginning, you’re going to have a divided mind. That’s normal. But you have to wrestle with the part of yourself that’s holding you back. That’s another season in success.

If you haven’t subdued your subconscious and those self-defeating intrusive thoughts, you can still go through a season of plenty. You can make a lot of money and look successful from the outside. Monetarily, you may have done very well.

But seasons end, and another one begins. All the good things that grew during those warm summer months can eventually wither on the vine.

[21:41] If you don’t know how to harvest it, it’ll sit in the field and rot.

You have to know what you’re doing, when you’re going to do it, and why you’re doing it. If you have no expectation for drawdown, then when drawdown eventually comes, it feels like the end of the world.

The first loss can make you think, “I should have never done this.” You experience the pain of being wrong and then face an uncertainty that’s even harder than staring at the hard right edge of a chart and not knowing what price will do next. You’ve forgotten that part of the mystery.

[22:20] Now it’s all about you.

“Am I really going to be able to do this? Am I ready? Do I really want to risk more money? I just lost however much money on that trade.”

Suddenly, it feels like your entire reason for doing this has been taken away. Why?

Because you championed the idea to your friends and family. You talked the game up. You built yourself up and put yourself on a pedestal you hadn’t even climbed onto yet. And now everyone’s sitting around, watching you, waiting to see it happen.

[23:01] You have to keep your mouth shut in the beginning. That’s another season in success.

There are talkers—people who constantly say, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this.” And then… nothing.

Then there are people who stay quiet. They don’t tell everyone their business, which means they never have to wrestle with the thought, “What would they think about me if they knew?”

They don’t need to know anything about you. Your friends and family aren’t owed information about you participating in this.

[23:34] It’s simple. While you’re learning without risking money—while you’re learning to become an analyst—your spouse doesn’t need to know every detail. That’s not going behind their back. It’s not deception because you’re not risking funds that belong equally to your family.

You can say, *“Well, my money is my money.” *No, it’s not.

That’s another topic for another day.

But while you’re learning, stay quiet. Put your observations in your journal, and frame them positively.

[24:20] Never criticize yourself. Instead, highlight opportunities: “This was something I wasn’t expecting, and I’m thankful it happened today because now I have an opportunity to study it. It didn’t hurt me, and I’ll be better prepared for it in the future.”

See how much stronger that is than saying, “This was such a crappy day. Everything I did was wrong. This stuff doesn’t work in my hands. I hate myself, I hate this whole thing, and I wish I had never started.”

[24:53] Maybe you didn’t actually write those things down. But that’s what you’re thinking.

The fact that you’re your own hardest critic—the fact that you can judge yourself more harshly from a one-sided perspective than anyone else ever could—is actually a strength.

[25:33] But as we’re growing up and learning how to become adults, nobody really sits us down and teaches us how to channel that tendency in a positive direction and use it as a strength.

We’re not really taught how to manage our emotions—anger management, loss management, depression.

In trading, you’re going to wear a mask. The question is: what is the mask for?

[27:00] Is the mask hiding what you’re suffering through by your own hands? Are you hiding it from your loved ones because you’re afraid of embarrassment? Are you hiding it from relatives and coworkers so they can’t laugh at you and say, “See? I told you you’d end up right back here with us.”

It’s okay to wear a mask when it comes to your subconscious. Your subconscious has to be tricked. It has to be fooled into believing that it isn’t right right now. You can’t give it a reason to rise up and say, “See? I told you so.”

[27:46] When you’re journaling and refusing to use negative language, you’re not giving your subconscious a reason to rise up and say, “I told you so,” because it’s sitting there waiting all the time.

That intrusive thought is going to spring on you like a leopard: *“Boom. I told you. Here we are. You’ve put us in a real pickle now, and you believed all this stuff was going to work. What a fool you are.” *Think about that.

But when you give it no ammunition, no energy, and no room in your thoughts, words, actions, or the way you record your experiences in your journal, you’re empowering yourself.

[28:33] You’re wearing a mask that nobody outwardly knows you’re wearing. Nobody sees it. But while you’re developing, you’re shielding yourself from those intrusive thoughts that your subconscious will try to bring to the surface. And this is another season in success.

Everyone who has ever become successful had to wrestle with doubt. They had to work through second thoughts and second-guessing: “Is this really for me?”

If it really is for you, minor setbacks in the beginning aren’t going to change your mind. Losing an account isn’t going to change your mind.

[29:13] If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll do some self-reflection and say, “You know what? A lot of people have gone through this and eventually did well because they refined what they were doing and corrected the mistakes they were making.”

If you’re honest, make those corrections, and keep working at it, you’ll make progress in overcoming those problems. I can’t give you a timeline for that, and nobody else can either, because now you have scar tissue. You did something wrong. You lost. That’s part of the process.

Control drawdown and leverage

[29:49] It is, in and of itself, a season in success—and that season will come again. I’m talking about losing money. I’m talking about drawdown.

The mechanism you have control over is how far you allow that drawdown to go without blowing the account.

In the beginning, it’s usually, “Well, let’s see what happens.” You over-leverage. You’re excited. You know what your model says, but then you look at the market and think, “Wow, look at this right now.” You’re like a kid in a candy store—impulsive.

Then you get your cheeks clapped, your wig split, and now you’re broke.

[30:33] Most people at that point say, “Forget this. I’m not trading anymore. I’m done.” They learned their lesson. They got burned.

But they don’t reflect on the fact that they weren’t even doing what their model told them to do. They don’t recognize that their character flaws were the real problem.

It wasn’t the model. It wasn’t the approach to trading. They simply hadn’t fixed the problems within themselves. The experience just revealed those problems, but they don’t recognize that.

[31:09] They don’t look at what happened and say, “You know what? This revealed something about me. I didn’t follow my rules. I acted impulsively. I got excited.”

Those are all things a trader isn’t supposed to do.

Listen to anyone who’s consistently making money and actually knows how to mentor. They’ll tell you those behaviors should be shunned. You shouldn’t be emotional about trading. You should be indifferent to it. You should be rule-based.

You shouldn’t be lured into a trade simply because you saw something on the chart that you weren’t even looking for.

[31:41] It’s outside your model. It’s outside the spec.

“Oh, it looks like it’s going to go up. Let me jump in.”

How does that relate to your model?

“Well, it doesn’t, but I have a hunch.”

Well, you’re going to be hunched over in a minute like you just got kicked in the balls.

The bottom line is this: you can’t continuously make mistakes and expect success.

There’s a time for planting, a time for harvesting, and a time for reaping. It comes by good authority.

[32:55] “ICT says don’t trade on Mondays.” Sometimes it’s good not to trade even when the market is moving around. If you’re not properly equipped, you’re not thinking clearly, you’re out of sorts, discombobulated, or simply not in sync, you’re not going to follow your model correctly.

Now you’re wrestling with, “I gotta get it back. I gotta get it back.”

For the people who come out and honestly say, “I had a losing day today,” sometimes they wear it like a badge of virtue signaling.

[33:41] “Wow, look at your transparency. That’s commendable.”

Sometimes it’s genuine. I think I have a pretty good ability to judge people’s character. I’ve had it since I was a kid, and when something is genuine, I recognize it.

But there are also plenty of people who do it because they think it’ll win them followers and clout. It doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean they’re going to resolve the issue that caused the loss. It may simply be how they deflected from it.

[34:17] They swept the problem under the rug instead of attacking it. Because it’s not always your model failing. Many times, the model was there, but you didn’t operate it correctly.

That’s another season in success—thinking you have everything together because you finally have a model, but then trying to act before your model actually speaks.

You think price is going higher. You think it’s a good time to buy based on the session. You think it’s going to run toward those relative equal highs.

Grade IFVGs and breakers

[34:50] But your model says you should be trading an Inversion Fair Value Gap, a Bullish Breaker, or something to that effect. It’s been graded so that you’re not trying to trade every potential Fair Value Gap you see.

Isn’t it funny now when people come forward and say, “Look, ICT is losing money because he’s trading all these different Fair Value Gaps.”

We know exactly which ones we’re looking for and why the others aren’t as important. And isn’t it interesting that now you’ve spent enough time with me, you’re beginning to see these things for yourself?

[35:23] By contrast, when you listen to people outside our community who don’t know what’s going on, they have no idea how we interpret price. They have zero understanding of it.

But you can understand why they see it the way they do. From their perspective, it makes perfect sense. “Why wouldn’t these traders trade that Fair Value Gap? There are three candles and there’s a gap.”

But that’s not necessarily the one we’re trading. It has to be graded within a dealing range, and it has to occur at the right time.

[35:52] That’s progress. That’s another season in success.

Some of my students were very vocal last week and openly admitted that they were having difficulties. It was hard for them. Meanwhile, other traders were doing it correctly right in front of you.

As a teacher, that frustrates me because I know I’ve given you tools that are preventative by nature. I have plenty of concepts that can help you make money. I also have very intricate concepts that can give you incredible precision.

Choosing not to trade

[36:45] But I also have concepts that simply tell you: do nothing right now. I could write an entire book with 20 chapters explaining when you should not do something.

*When Not to Trade, by Michael J. Huddleston. *Nobody would buy that book. But that’s the book everybody should read first.

And you know where that book has already been written? On my YouTube channel and in these Spaces. I have an encyclopedia’s worth of material explaining why certain conditions should tell you to do absolutely nothing.

Because not taking a position is the purest form of self-control and profitability.

[37:37] What? Yes.

The other side of profitability is holding on to what you already have. It’s not always, “I need more than I had yesterday. I need more equity than I had after my last trade.”

Do you think that’s the only component of being consistently profitable?

Consistent profitability also means being able to say, “I could take that trade. It looks like the setup is there. But I’m having an internal conflict because I want to keep trading even though I’ve already reached my target for the week.”

[38:10] Maybe you weren’t expecting such a gangbusters delivery today. What you expected the market to deliver over several days for the entire week has already been delivered into your hands today—and it’s only Monday.

Your model says that once you hit your target, you’re done. So enjoy the bliss of being finished without putting on more risk. Do you know how hard that is?

It’s easier to pull a pork chop out of a pit bull’s mouth.

Because as traders, what are we naturally inclined to do?

[38:47] We’re hanging out with everybody else, watching what they’re doing. “Oh, how much money did they make today? That’s all he made? That’s all she did? You call yourself a trader? You made how many thousands of dollars, and that’s all you’ve done? Girl, please.”

So where do you turn? Right to social media. That’s another season in success.

[40:47] Some of you may never want to teach. You just want to make a lot of money and do whatever you want—until eventually that becomes boring.

Or maybe it’ll happen the way it did for me. Everyone else around me was still working. My friends and family had the opportunity to do what I was doing, and naturally, you want to help everybody.

That’s another season in success. Once you start making money and doing well, you want your friends to experience that same splashover effect: “Hey, you’re my friend. I love you. I want you to experience this too.”

[41:23] But what they sometimes hear is, “I have lots of money, and I’m going to give some of it to you for nothing. You don’t have to do anything.”

Then, when you don’t give them money—but you’re willing to give them your time, your attention, even your weekends, and teach them how to do it themselves—the response becomes, “No, no, bro. I’m not interested in that. But you’re a jerk because you won’t give me any money.”

That’s another season in success.

When you eventually reach the point where you’re not only a trader but someone capable of teaching, you’re going to encounter people who tell you how you should do it.

[42:02] “You should do it this way.” “I don’t believe you.”

“You should do this, or you’re not a real trader.”

I’m not interested in talking to people like that. If you can’t recognize what we’re doing—“Here’s where price is going to go. Watch this right here. Is this low marked on your chart?”—then you’re missing the point.

[42:34] Simple little nudges like that, nothing extra each week. Have you noticed that? That’s experience. That’s a season in success.

Mastering your decisions—knowing when you’re going to do something and, more importantly, when you’re not going to do something—is the highest level a trader can reach. Think about that. You know when you’re not going to do something, no matter what.

There are plenty of times when I excuse myself from the marketplace, and then you all come back asking, “Dude, how did you know?”

[43:19] It’s experience. I don’t have to say anything. I just have to conduct myself as the teacher. Watch what I’m doing, watch how I’m doing it, and pay attention to when I’m not doing it.

Then go back and listen to these long, boring conversations. That’s where I’m giving you the details behind the decisions to do nothing—to sit still and abstain from risk.

When the market acts like a dirty hooker, you have to take her word for it. You can’t lay down with it.

[43:56] You can’t touch it. You don’t want an STD. We’re not traders looking for one-night stands with success: *“Oh yeah, I got lucky tonight.” *No, no, no.

We’re looking for a marriage with success. We’re putting a ring on the hand of success. We’re not out here just trying to wine and dine. We’re trying to build a legacy—a family tree of success.

That one-night-stand mentality is what permeates this industry: fast money, quick payouts.

[44:40] *“We guarantee you’ll get a payout in the first week or the first month, or you don’t pay until you do.” *Seriously?

If these people could trade as well as they claim, they wouldn’t be panhandling and begging for your money. They wouldn’t need to sell you anything. If they truly had an unlimited blank check every Monday when the markets opened, they wouldn’t be selling anything.

When you start recognizing that, that’s another season in success. You look around and realize that many of these people don’t actually know what they claim to know.

[45:17] They don’t know what they tell you they know. It’s a marketing ploy, because the people who actually know how to make money—hello—aren’t asking you for anything. They’re not selling anything. They’re simply out here doing it for free.

There’s no money coming to me from doing this. I could have made this a video, put it on YouTube, and monetized it. Instead, you’re all going to take this, put it on your own YouTube channels, and make money from it. I’m not.

[45:52] I already know what I’m capable of doing. I already know I’m going to make six figures before Wednesday.

But where are you in that thought process? Where are you when it comes to knowing what you’re capable of doing, when you’re going to do something, and when you’re not going to do something? If you’re not thinking that way, you need to start.

Plan around your observations of the economic calendar, what the market is doing, and the season of the year. We’re coming out of the summer months, folks.

[46:29] We’re moving into the fall, when people have high expectations for the market to behave a certain way. Usually, the market comes down into a discount. It’s reasonable to anticipate that, and we’re already seeing signs of it.

I point your attention to very specific key levels and very specific PD Arrays. How far off were they from the weekly high and the daily high? It’s pretty wild, isn’t it?

And that’s not even my best stuff. That’s just the casual version—me trying to get all of you as close as possible with the limited understanding you have right now.

[47:13] And I’m not trying to be degrading when I say that, because there are a lot of new people coming here. A lot of new folks arrive and they’re intimidated.

Maybe they’re asking me questions and I don’t answer them, but that’s simply because I have so many people asking me questions on X. If I responded to every single post directed at me, I would live on X.

I know you think I do, but I don’t. I’d never get anything done.

[47:43] It’s the same with email. I don’t even look at my inbox anymore. I dread it.

Eventually, when you get good at this, you’re going to want to become an influencer—even if you don’t want to in the beginning—because life can get boring, just like it did for me.

[48:22] All of my friends and family were still working. Here I was, 20 years old, looking around with more money than I could have imagined, knowing I could make it whenever I wanted, while everybody else was at work.

Sometimes I’d tell my friends, “Look, call out of work. I’ll give you a whole week’s paycheck. Let’s just go somewhere. Let’s do something. Let’s go down to Ocean City.” That’s when Ocean City was cool.

*“Let’s go shopping. Whatever I buy, you can get it too.” *I just wanted to escape the boredom.

[48:51] That’s another season in success. Boredom will get you in trouble. Making decisions out of boredom will lead to losses. It’ll cause heartache. It’ll even give you children you didn’t plan for. Let’s put it that way. My oldest son was one of those decisions. I was bored, and there you go. Now I have an oldest son.

Money is easy to make, but if you have a woman who’s been with you since you were a dog—when you didn’t have anything, didn’t even have a bark, and you were on a short leash—don’t suddenly decide she isn’t good enough because now you’re off the leash and think you can do whatever you want.

[53:21] You’re a fool. If you find a spouse you can trust and love, someone who builds alongside you, what do you think you’re going to find by leaving that? Especially when all you’re broadcasting to the world is that you have a whole lot for someone to take. Because in this world right now, everybody wants to take.

[53:56] So many of you are in such a hurry to floss how much money you have and how much you make. All you’re doing is putting a bullseye on yourself and inviting someone to think, “How can I scam this guy? How can I defraud this person? How can I create a situation where they have to pay me?”

Think about it. “Oh, that would never happen to me.”

Yeah, keep thinking that and watch what happens.

Having a lot of money is wonderful, but it also gives you reasons to be concerned.

[54:31] You have to worry about people trying to sue you. Every time I’m driving, I’m watching for someone to pull out in front of me and slam on their brakes. That’s why I have dash cams.

I’ve seen enough of these situations to know I need to be proactive, so now I have cameras in both the front and rear of my cars. If something like that happens, I have footage proving that I didn’t cause the collision. But until I started seeing videos of it happening on X, I never even thought about it.

[56:04] When you go through life making lots of money, losing lots of money, losing relationships, and damaging your health while making lots and lots of money, you learn some things.

Eventually, you become the older person you used to hear speaking when you were younger, telling you, “Life is going to do this. Life is going to do that.” Maybe it was your grandparents. Maybe it was your father or your mother trying to tell you certain things. And back then, you thought, “Shut up, man.”

[56:38] *“I don’t have time for that. That was your time. It has nothing to do with me. I’m going to be the exception.” *Until you’re not.

I’m proud of you because you’re trying. A lot of people won’t keep trying while they’re feeling what you’re feeling, because that’s a season in success most people don’t want to go through.

They don’t want to walk through those valleys. They want it easy. Then they discover that the valley is a lot longer than they expected, with longer shadows to walk through. The light doesn’t shine as deeply down there. It’s colder. You don’t feel the warmth of the sun the same way.

[58:30] And most people tap out. They quit. The fact that you’re still trying makes me proud. It makes me very proud of you. The moment you stop trying, that’s when I would no longer be proud.

Nobody was there telling me, “I’m proud of you,” when I was going through the same things—crying and weeping over price charts, wishing I understood what was happening.

And back then, I was only trading commodities. I wasn’t trading intraday. I was working from daily charts. That’s easy. It’s nice and slow. You have plenty of time to plan.

[59:13] Now here I am trading 15-second and 5-second charts, making decisions just like that, making money moves.

Hashtag making money moves, baby. Let’s get it trending.

Now look at you. Take a step back and think about this for a moment.

Here you are on a Saturday evening, listening to someone the internet calls a “verified fraud,” while the market isn’t even trading. You’re sitting here listening to a guy coach you for free. Think about that.

It’s commendable that you’re spending your weekend night pursuing something you believe in while most people are out getting drunk.

[01:00:01] Most of those people are going to wake up tomorrow regretting the decisions they’re making right now.

I had a rather long email sent to me, and I was able to listen to it using text-to-voice. It covered many of the same things I’ve talked about tonight—the things this person was wrestling with—and ultimately, they just wanted some encouragement. They wanted someone to remind them, “Hey, look, is it normal for me to feel this way?”

[01:00:45] Sure it is. Absolutely.

In fact, it would be abnormal for you not to recognize it and feel it. The real danger is when you enter a loser cycle and become numb to it. You stop caring what happens and just keep hurting yourself—putting on trades with real money, blowing prop firm accounts, resetting them over and over again, and running up bills.

I’ve seen people—not my students, but others—who have spent $100,000 pursuing this and never received a single payout.

[01:01:22] People can sit back and laugh at someone like that, but I see someone who’s desperately trying to accomplish something. They believe it’s possible for them so strongly that they’re willing to spend that much money pursuing it.

All they need is someone to sit them down and say, “Look, you have more than enough tenacity to become a trader. You have more than enough. The fact that you’re willing to spend that much pursuing this proves it.”

You just need someone to help you calibrate what you’re doing.

[01:01:53] Sometimes all it takes is a small adjustment—get your bearings pointed in the right direction. Stop doing some of these things, spend more time doing these other things, and make a few subtle changes. Then the losses start slowing down. That’s a trader.

Because losing money is the deal breaker. If there isn’t another one, that’s it. When you’re learning how to trade, the first time you’re baptized in the fires of loss and watch your money burn up just like that, that’s when the real decision-making begins. Everybody wants to be a trader up until that moment.

[01:02:41] That’s when you’re challenged.

“I believed it was going to do this. I believed it was going to do that. It didn’t do those things, and it came back and stopped me out.”

Okay. What bearing does that have on the efficacy of your model or your ability as a trader? Here’s how you answer that: don’t rush back in.

But what do most people do? They rush right back in to get the money back, because in their mind, recovering that loss will prove they’re a better trader than they currently feel like they are.

Responding to losses

[01:03:17] Stillness is power. Being still and refusing to take another trade is self-control. That’s not weakness. It doesn’t make you less of an epic trader. It’s exactly what you need to become.

You need to become a management specialist.

I see people asking to talk. I’m not going to have conversations with anybody tonight because I’m actually getting close to wrapping this up.

The urge to rush back into the market after a loss is one of the most toxic things you can experience as a trader, yet it feels completely natural. That’s another season in success.

[01:04:00] In the beginning, you think that reaction is normal. You think that’s exactly what a trader is supposed to do.

But a consistently profitable trader—someone following sound logic and a consistent model—doesn’t think that way anymore. They can certainly identify with the beginner because they remember what it felt like. After a loss, the inexperienced trader wants to get the money back immediately because they’re uncomfortable carrying a net loss overnight or finishing the week negative. To them, that means they’re losing.

[01:04:39] It means they’re a loser trader.

But every trader starts every trade as a losing trader. The moment you enter, you have to overcome the costs of putting that position on—the spread, commissions, fees, and everything else.

Every trade begins as a losing trade. You have to wrestle that trade into the win column.

So having a loss doesn’t mean you’re a bad trader, and it doesn’t mean your model or approach to trading is poor.

[01:05:13] What happens after that loss is critical.

Every consistently profitable trader can look back and identify the point where they learned that making rash decisions while in drawdown was one of the worst things they could do.

So when you experience a loss or enter drawdown, your first reaction should be: “I’m removing myself from risk.”

The rule is absolute. **I cannot hemorrhage. I cannot bleed money. **But nobody wants to do that because it means going home with a loss.

[01:05:57] It means seeing a negative number on your statement, your trading panel, or your statistics. And somehow, you convince yourself that this makes you unworthy of being a trader. That’s not true.

Those are your intrusive thoughts taking over because you haven’t yet mastered your emotions or your trading psychology. You haven’t learned to accept that you, as the operator, are going to make mistakes sometimes.

You have to forgive yourself. You have to allow those mistakes to happen because you’re not going to avoid them completely.

[01:06:40] They’re going to come.

The only thing we can do as traders is prepare for them instead of pretending they won’t happen.

Most people come out of the gate after finding some mentor, reading a book, buying a course, listening to someone online, or watching a live streamer and think, “Man, I’m going to make money because this person is the bomb. They’re the one.”

Then they suffer a loss, and deep down they want to blame that person, that book, that mentor, or that entire school of thought.

[01:07:21] But none of that is responsible. It’s you.

Nothing outside of you made you press that button. Nobody but you chose the leverage you used. Nobody but you listened to that intrusive thought saying, “I’m ready to take on risk,” when you weren’t.

In the beginning, you don’t think this way. You block all of those warnings out.

Common sense will be tingling like Spider-Sense: “Okay, maybe I shouldn’t do this.”

And what do you say? “Shut up. I’m going to make a lot of money today.”

[01:08:03] Then you lose a lot of money that day, and suddenly your mind is flooded with irrational decisions. You start thinking about how quickly you can get it back.

Faster decisions. More decisions. More trades.

“I took a loss, so the only way to fix it is to take more trades. More leverage. More signals. More setups. I’ll watch the smaller time frames. I’ll look for every little fluctuation. I’ll try this instead. I’m a scalper now.”

[01:08:32] Maybe you were an intraday trader, looking for a position in the morning and holding toward the daily close. Then you take a loss, and suddenly you’re ready to system-hop and change everything. Are you thinking rationally? No.

That’s another season in success. Successful traders have gone through this. They’ve wanted to abandon their model and their entire approach because of the discomfort of being temporarily unprofitable while waiting for their model and their trade psychology to come back into sync.

[01:09:09] That means reaching the point where you’re no longer being dragged into the market because you can’t stand being in your own skin: “I have to do something. I can’t stand being down this much money.”

Imagine the surgeon who’s about to operate on your child comes into the pre-op room and says, “Hey, how are you all doing? I just want you to know I’m having a really bad day. Yesterday I went home and found my wife in bed with another man, so I’m really high-strung today.”

“I’d appreciate some patience on your part. I’m going to do my best.”

[01:09:44] How confident would you be leaving your child in that person’s hands?

They’re not thinking rationally. They’re not thinking with your child’s best interests in mind.

Is that exact situation likely to happen? Probably never. But that’s the equivalent of what you’re doing when you’re brand new, have very little experience, lose money, and immediately try to trade again.

You start thinking irrationally, but while you’re in that state, it feels normal.

[01:10:13] So why would you let that surgeon operate on your child?

Because that’s essentially what you’re doing to yourself. You’re allowing someone with no experience—no experience being consistently profitable—to tell you that you should take more trades. And that someone is the intrusive, undermining part of yourself.

It comes through your subconscious and feels like an inkling or a hunch: “Oh, this is the one that’s going to work.”

[01:10:48] *“I was wrong earlier. I can accept that. But this is the trade that’s really going to work, and I’m going to get all my money back on this one.” *No, you’re not.

You’re going to lose. You’re going to hemorrhage more money, then speed up the process until you eventually blow the account.

That’s how tilt happens all the time. It’s never anything else.

And anyone who’s honest about having gone through it will tell you: “Yep. That’s very close to what happened to me.”

[01:11:17] There may be subtle nuances and differences here and there, but generally it’s the same thing. Your mind slips into irrational thinking because you don’t yet have enough experience to force yourself onto the sidelines and say, “I’m not doing anything. I need to calm down. I need to remind myself that it’s just money. I didn’t blow my account. It doesn’t change the efficacy of my model, and it doesn’t mean I’m a bad trader.”

It simply means you have to take ownership of what you did wrong, reevaluate what happened, and make sure you don’t repeat the same mistake.

[01:11:51] And next time, you go in with less leverage.

“Well, that means it’s going to take me longer to make the money back, Michael. I’m not into that. That’s not going to work for me.”

You’re right. It’s not going to work for you, and you won’t remain a trader. The industry will eventually find a way to remove you. Darwinism works in trading. It’s the only place it exists.

Survival of the fittest. Only the strong.

[01:12:20] Anyway, it’s now quarter after 10. I’m going to close this one out and wish you all a very pleasant weekend.