Transcript for:
Trading and Personal Responsibility by ICT

Well, good morning. It is a good morning. I hope you're doing well. So, I felt a little impulsive this morning. Uh, I got up for a little Earlier than I planned to be today. And I, I made my rounds through YouTube and looked at the folks that I like to follow and see what they posted and see what their latest updated, uh, social media posts would be. And I came across one of the guys I follow who I'm rooting for. And a lot of you don't understand why, but, uh, he was the inspiration behind. This discussion today. Now, right away, let me preface it by saying, this is the kind of thing that the millennials that have it right now, give it to me, I demand it, you owe it to me and make it real easy, and I don't want to have to put any effort into it. Uh, this is the kind of topic or discussion that you're not going to like, because it's going to require you to do some personal inventory. It's also going to put limitations on where you're placing your focus, what you should be doing. How you should be thinking and the millennial mindset is don't tell me how to think. I'll learn how to do that on social media. So, uh, in trading and investing, you're, you're entering an arena where the sharpest minds in the world are out here trying to cannibalize one another. And if you come in with a very limited perspective on how the markets are going to behave, how you are going to engage in these marketplaces. Um, you're going to have your clock linked, okay, very efficiently and expediently, and it will be sudden and you won't feel like anyone can be profitable or anyone can trade. And I've seen that over the years as an educator, you know, coming in contact with a lot of different personalities, a lot of different cultural divides, and largely the repeating phenomenon. Is that the lack of personal responsibility and also the just disproportionate level of what is realistic versus what's being promoted largely on social media. So I want to talk a little bit and I probably will be about an hour or less today. So I'm on schedule, so I have to make sure I stay on that that time frame. It's around the holidays and it's Something I'm trying to squeeze in on my personal time. Usually I do these types of things or did these things. I'm not on Twitter anymore, but I would do Twitter spaces. And I wanted to kind of encourage you because we're ending in 2023. A lot of you have learned a great deal of new things. On the YouTube channel, you've learned a lot of things about trading. You maybe you've discovered a lot of things about yourself. Maybe you found the model. Maybe you found the beginning footings, if you will, of a progress that you want to see increase and move forward. And I'm trying to encourage you to do that today. But also I want to remind you some of the things that I met coming up. And also what I see a lot of traders and a lot of influencers slash traders. And a lot of YouTubers that pretend to be traders, those pitfalls they're falling victim to, and admittedly, I have reached out to them both publicly and privately to try to encourage them to do things a little bit differently. And I understand some people just don't want to take advice, especially some of them not wanting to receive it from me, but that's, you know, that's a miss one, it's misfortunate for both of us, because I'd like to see these individuals improve. And I see them at a position of stagnant development. The chart will not change in this discussion, by the way. So your, your screen's not frozen. There'll be a list of things here and I'll show you the first one. Uh, the first pitfall and plague of trading well is unrealistic expectations or results that you think that you have to have. Okay. And before I say anything more, just let me say this. We are in a performance oriented. Industry. It's all about the results. Okay. Whose results matter? Yours, not mine, not the people that you follow, not the people that you're trying to learn from, not the people you pocket watch on social media. This person has the better car. This person has the better house. This person has the better trading setup, the better, the better monitor array, the better trading desk, the better whatever. All of those things do nothing to put money in your pocket or add to your bottom line on your account. Now that's not to say you can't be entertained by those types of things, but unfortunately the state of the world today is they equate that to being equivalent to, well, I can be like them and I want to be successful. So I can do those things versus I want to learn how to trade. So I don't have to go to work. I want to have a profitable trading endeavor so that way I can operate like a business. And be an entrepreneur and have the benefits of living a better lifestyle. And that's not being rich. Okay. That's not, that's not being promised to you here, but another stream of income that you can feel confident that you're going to be able to do this in perpetuity without the necessity of you going to punch a time clock or leaning on the salary that a boss says that this is what you're worth to me. That's not guaranteed to you next year in 2024. That could change. So when we look at people and I'm going to lump myself into this, okay, for all fairness, um, I share a lot of examples that many of you. Sometimes, uh, say in my comment section, you did it a lot on Twitter too. Not all of you are guilty of this, but I I'm of the opinion that it's the majority. I know that sometimes I'm executing with models that I have not fully revealed or entry mechanisms or things like that. And invariably I'll see people say, I took the exact same trait. You're lying to yourself. I don't believe you and those types of things are not going to help you as a trader because what you're doing is you're saying to yourself in a comment to me that I'm not believing. Now, if you show, this is my example, and I have students that do this, they'll record themselves in engaging price, managing it, and I reached out to a person that just recently, the other day, did almost the same trade that I did. And I gave him a call out on my community tab. He's over on Twitter. Just look at that name. Look at all the recent tweets towards me. Now I'm not active on Twitter, but that person did exactly as close as you can can to what I did in terms of trying to trade the market. Was it exact same field? No. Was it exact same targets? No. But the same premise, what was he employing? What he learned? Okay. What he learned. So unrealistic results are assuming that you're going to have the same entries. The same targets, the same everything about my trade. When you don't hit that, it will be frustrating and you'll start doing other things because that impulsiveness will rise up in you and you're going to know in the deepest part of you that you can't do what I'm doing yet. Not that you can't, but you can't do it yet. So then you start pushing a button to see, well, let me entertain myself because I don't feel well about What I think I should be able to do because I've watched a lot of these videos. Therefore it means I should know how to do it when you haven't practiced it, you haven't studied it, you haven't put chart time in, you haven't logged anything. And those things they will equate to in delivery that the results that you're looking for, but just simply watching videos that doesn't do it. Watching videos without taking notes doesn't do it. So having unrealistic results in mind, meaning watching things like A Robins cup performance next year, or watching what the, the historical returns have been and thinking that you're going to walk out there and you're trading, not necessarily entering the competition, but trading with that level of return, every one of those individuals out there today, if you go look at it in any one of those divisions, they're all respectable returns, they're not to be diminished. I'm not trying to say that they're not good returns. They're great returns. If you're making a hundred percent return on your money in a year. And granted, there are a lot of you that are my students. There's a lot of you that don't even trade the way I trade and you can do better than a hundred percent return in a year. So please put your ego aside because we're not out here trying to measure up anything. I'm trying to focus on the students or traders that are trying to accomplish consistency and the things that they may or may not have identified are problematic barriers that they're either going to have to overcome or will eventually become a factor in their development and how to get around those types of things. At least how I did it and how I actively teach my own students and my own children. And I'll talk about my son, Cameron, who's wrestling with a lot of things as well. So you have to be realistic about this. Okay. And watching someone that's been doing it for a very long time and assuming that you're going to watch a few videos that you would maybe have been following me for a number of years and then thinking, well, I should be able to do what you're doing when none of you would be expected to be able to trade like that. I would never have that expectation of you years down the road. You will. But just simply because you went through a video series, you know, watch a couple of videos and maybe you looked at some old charts or maybe watching some of my executions, you might feel an affinity for wanting to trade like this, but don't assume for a moment that it's realistic for you to expect yourself to be able to walk out in 2024 and trade like that. So when you see, uh, your favorite YouTuber, your favorite online personality, and me in that list as well, our results are unique to us. You don't know what we're wrestling with at the time. You don't know what things are factors that are really plaguing us behind the scenes while in a trade. You don't know if we feel good about the leverage that we've put on or not. There's been several instances where I have shown executions this week. And when I moved my stock because of. Personal schedules. I want to be able to share something with you. And I moved to stop a little bit more aggressive than I would normally do. If I wasn't trying to meet a time scheduled event, like my son going to the dentist, like my wife saying, Hey, you know, we got to get the tree up. We got to do this. We got to get new sets of this for something around the house. Cause I'm a family person as well. I have a family, I have a wife, I have a honey to do or honey do list that she likes to throw at me. You know, these are all things. That you as a person are going to have to manage in your trading as well. And while you're learning how to do this, if you ever went to uni, if you've been a college student, whatnot, those types of things, you had to balance that as well. You had to work your job. If you had to keep a job, study, do all those things. And it's a lot on your plate. And it's important that you realize that no one's holding you to a unrealistic expectation of yourself, except for you, you, you're doing that and don't allow other people to inflate what you should be viewing as realistic results. And what is a realistic result? To me, if you can make 2 percent a week. That's phenomenal. Now, obviously you that's way below someone that's been trading for a long time, but that's, that's really nothing in terms of the grand scheme of things. But we're talking about where you are right now, the, the, the lack of consistency or the trader student that is. Unable to find their way in consistency. Where should you aim? Finding yourself in the realm of 2 percent positive on the week. That is not a high watermark where you can't reach it. It is absolutely obtainable and you can do it risking one quarter of 1%. Now that's not sexy. That's not in vogue right now. That's not a popular thing to be risking that little, because in your mindset, you're thinking, I can't get rich risking so little. I got to risk big money. That's a lie. The people that say that are not profitable anyway, in their mind, that tells you that number one, they're mathematically challenged. They have no understanding of compound interest. They have no consistency in modeling a trading plan. They have no idea what they're looking for. They have no faith in what they're looking for is going to repeat just about every single day. And because creatures of habit, that's what humans are. If you, if you follow or fly with a flock of birds, okay, that has a specific mindset, you will adopt that mindset, even if it is toxic. Because you're going to try to fit in and social media kind of captivates these individuals where they feel like they're, they're included in something. And you don't want to include yourself in to a community mindset that is unrealistic. Having astronomical rates of return, you know, while that's wonderful and it should be an aspiration over a long career walking out in your first few years as a fledgling, as a trader, uh, you know, it's, uh, it's going to sound like a buzzkill, but really it's not practical. And I fell victim to that when I first started, I felt like it was something that, you know, that's what that's going to tell me. I'm doing the right thing, making lots of money, doing it correctly. You with lots of, you know, percentage return, um, never losing. That's an unrealistic expectation as well. And I forced myself, I was actually talking to my private mentorship students, and I said, I was forcing myself. The trade in conditions that I don't generally want to trade in. And you've seen me get stopped out. You've watched me get stopped out and have to reenter using the rules that I teach. I traded. In settings that I would not risk real money in, and the questions that are coming up in the comment section, you know, why are you doing this? Because I'm showing you why I practice what I preach. Can I get it right sometimes? Yes. But is that enough reason for me to go out there and trade in front of the CPI? No. Is it enough reason for me to trade in front of the FOMC? No. Is it something I should be trading on a Thursday and Friday of nonfarm payroll? No. Can I? Yes. Can I get fortunate enough to have a setup fall in my favor? Yes, but that doesn't entice me to do it as a steady diet every single month because my precision, my accuracy, my trade management is greatly hindered by the level of volatility and uncertainty that is caused around those types of days. So I don't need to go out on social media to do those things to prove that my concepts or that I can trade or anybody else can learn this and have it transferable knowledge. I don't need to do those things, but because I want to close this year out with other things and talk about it in a manner where, hey, look, you can see those examples and think to yourself, wow, that's. That's really good. To me, when I look at this, I look at it as, I know it's entertaining for you, but I don't want you to look at it and say, well, I want to trade like you and do that, because that's not what this is about. There's been several times this year. And in my private mentorship, they will vouch for this too. I'm rarely accurate in my expectation of front of the CPI number. I've said it many times in Twitter spaces. I've said it many times in this YouTube channel, and I'm rarely accurate in terms of what I think the CPI is going to do. Before it does it. So if I had a model, if I had a approach that could take advantage of that, then clearly I'd be in there doing every single month when it's available, I'd be in there, you know, fleecing it every, every single opportunity, but because I've. I've seen enough to know that that's not realistic for me to know in advance with a great deal of consistency what that report's going to do, much like the nonfarm payroll. I can have a schematic in mind where I think that this is what the price is going to do. It's going to behave this way, it's going to attack this liquidity first, and then go here. But you know what that is? It's the equivalent of the same thing that a football team's head coach does when they're at the Super Bowl. They have a playbook. But how many times? Is the other team that didn't win looking at that playbook saying, but I had it all figured out beforehand. If the players just would have did this, if the candlesticks would have just did what they were supposed to do, that's unrealistic thinking. Those are unrealistic results. I know that these markets are going to be even more manipulated in a degree where I can't participate. And trust that my concepts, my models are going to perform as efficiently as they would if they're not in those particular settings, any given day of the week, apart from the things I've mentioned here, I'm pretty confident that I'm going to find something that I'm going to be able to take home. Now, me being your mentor, and you saying, I'm a student of you and I believe in your concepts, that doesn't equate to you being on the level, knowing how to do it yet. So don't blur that line, and some of you get very This is where it becomes, you know, admittedly, it's cult like, because anything that gets popular And it feels like you want to be a part of it. And it's able to do things that something different people want to plug into that. And it gives them an identity. You're stronger than that. You don't need to identify with me. You don't need to identify with my concepts. It doesn't mean you can't employ them. It doesn't mean that they can't be a basis for you to be trading. But so many of you are just trying to be part of something that's not required for you to be profitable. Meaning the the carnival like atmosphere. I love the camaraderie and the the tight knit feeling of our community many of you go on a defensive when you don't need to and That's an unrealistic result as well. You can't worry about defending me. You can't worry about defending my concept They do it all by themselves. Okay, I don't need anybody to defend me or how I trade Your focus should be primarily on you. What are you doing today? That's leading you to being better than you were yesterday, last week, last month, last quarter, last year. And are you logging that? You have to be journaling. If you're not journaling, that's an unrealistic result. You have no baseline measurement. You have no way of being able to judge. Are you really seeing progress? Because if you go by gut feeling, yeah, I feel better about getting in trade. That's nothing. There's, that's nothing. Some of those executions I did and shared with you this week and last, you know, once I got it in the trade, I was like, I wish I wouldn't have gotten this trade now. I wish I would have waited on another move and even got in at a higher price. Even though I was bullish, even though I got in at a lower price, I didn't like where I was in certain parts of those executions, but I was there. And that's exactly what it's like for you when you get into the real world, where you're trading with real money, you're going to push a button. And now what do you do if you don't feel so warmed up to the idea that you've placed yourself correctly? You either have to manage yourself. through that trade or kill it and then go in at a better place where you feel sound, you feel comfortable and books don't talk about these types of things. You know, other teachers, they don't talk about those things. It's something that you're going to encounter, but when you sugarcoat it and you put blinders on, you say, uh, well, I didn't really do anything wrong here because the trade did eventually pan out. Well, that's not accurate. You have to identify what caused you the uncomfortable state of mind. I was in, uh, I've been listening to, uh, the Top Step YouTube channel, those guys over there, they, uh, they used to trade on the floor and I absolutely love listening to their stories. I love listening to their banter. And I like using their chat window for sentiment because it's a wonderful way of being able to see, you know, overbought, oversold, when capitulations there, when I can fade that type of thing. And please don't be put off by that because they're doing the same thing. When they talk about their tilt, that's a sentiment indicator. You know, all of you are going to want to use that. And all I'm doing is using the real time sentiment indicators that the commentary of these participants in that chat window and other YouTubers I like to listen to, I'm not there to learn how to trade. I'm there for the community aspect of listening to them talk about how it was for them on the floor. I love hearing, I wish they would do more of that. I wish they would do more of that. I started when that was still the way of trading, you know, we're dinosaurs. That type of, that way of trading is gone. It'll never be like that again. And when I heard one of the gentlemen talk about how they had traded and while they did well, Enough to come out in a profit. He said, I don't like it. And even though I was profitable, I don't feel I did well today. You know what that is? That's not, that's not beating yourself up. That's reality. And that's exactly what all of you need to do. You can't just say, well, I pushed a button. I want to hope in a prayer. It worked out in my favor. So therefore it's skill, baby. Look at me, watch me shine. I have a great deal of respect for that. I have a great deal of respect for any trader that says, you know what? This worked out in my favor, but really it was just a state of me being fortunate enough. To see it come out in my favor. It had nothing to do with skill, because if I was being honest with you, I wish I wouldn't have taken that very trade there. Are you equipped to critique yourself that way where it's not, you're not beating yourself up. You're not undermining the, the mindset that you're going to need to tap into. You're not trying to, um, belittle yourself. You're not trying to shame yourself, but you're holding yourself to accountability. And that's a very, very hard line to walk. As a human being, let alone placing it on the measurement of making money or losing and equating that to failure or successfulness. And you can't, you can't do that in trading because you can be successful and still just taking very small losses or getting into a trade. And saying, Oh, well, um, I thought I saw something here, but it really isn't there. And if I hold on to it, really what I'm doing is I'm gambling because I don't feel confident about that setup and I'm not going to wrestle and arm wrestle myself and say, well, if I get out, I know it's going to run and I'm gonna regret that. No. A professional mindset doesn't think like that. You know who thinks like that? A gambler. You know, this, this slot machine is cold. I've been putting money on it for two, three hours. It ain't paying out nothing. But I know as soon as I get up, Larry over there in the corner, who's eating Dial it back, ICD. Slow down, slow down. Someone else is gonna slide on in when you get up, and you know what they're gonna do. They're gonna put enough money in. The ratio will be met and then the machine will pay out. And then you'll say, I knew I was right if I just would've. Well, you can't do that in trading. You can't have a slot machine mentality. Because if you're gaining the experience, learning how to navigate these markets, knowing what you're looking for, if that's not there for your trade. Everything's not saying this is really what you should be in right now. You're, you're all things are our go for this trade to be profitable. If those things are not, in fact, what's going on for your trade, then you need to kill it or at the very minimum, take half the trade off and let experience guide you in the rest of it. But if you're honest with yourself right now, if we were in a conversation together. It was just the privacy of you and I talking. And I would say, Hey, have you ever had this experience where you knew you shouldn't have been in the trade, but yet you're still in it? Wouldn't you, wouldn't you feel uncomfortable saying it publicly? You would feel uncomfortable because you're equating it to, well, it's not something that, um, you know, people should, uh, blame. They shouldn't blame me for it. They shouldn't have, uh, any harsh criticism because I'm trading. I'm doing more than you. And I was willing to hold on to the trade, even though I knew it was not likely to be profitable. I was able to hold on to it. So therefore it makes me stronger. No, it makes you a gambler. It makes you a gambler. It makes you hold on to emotional stimuli for fear of feeling an emotional stimuli at a later time. That was going to be regretful because if you're right, if you're right, And you hold on to it. You're going to call that skill. And I'm here to tell you that's not skill. If you know your model's no longer in that setup, you're in there blind. You're like a sailboat in a storm with no rudder, wherever the wind's going to carry you, that's where you're going to go. And if you make it to shore somewhere, you're going to call that port of destination where you intended to be. And that's a lie. That's a lie. So having realistic results. Being comfortable with it, being content with it, aiming for a very low hanging fruit objective 2%. And if you're beginning, and if you're not really consistent, aim for 2 percent a week. I promise you, I promise you, you can make a lot of money if that's all you ever do. And you intend to trade the rest of your life. 2 percent per week does wonders, does wonders, but see, you think it needs to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. You see these people getting these payouts in these funded account companies. How many times did they have to reset and how many times did they blow out? That's the, that's the stat I would love to see when they put up their payout, you know, leaderboard says, Hey, this trader just took out 20, 000. This trader just took a payout of 50, 000. Here's how you make it really good. And it's encouragement and it reminds the people that are trying to pursue that type of trading say, Okay, look, this person failed this many times. This is how many times this person tried to do a combine. This is how many times they got into a, a Funded account and then lost it. And now this is where they're at. This is how long it took them. Then, then you would be able to tap into some real data, some real information that would really be helpful to you because it isn't a flash in the pan overnight success. I know it wasn't for me, and I'm not saying that it can't happen for someone. Lightning strikes, you know, it happens sometimes, but as a realistic expectation that everybody should expect it for themselves. That's not practical. And this isn't a popular talking point, but it's the very thing that you need to be reminded of. I'm just going to drop the name here because I think, you know, if, if you listen to the person talking in the video that I'm going to mention here in a second, put aside all the things about the person and the personality and the things that they've said in the past and how they carry on and whatnot, because it's all in my, to my opinion, it's, Performance for entertainment purposes and to draw a crowd, which, you know, I'm good at that. But when you listen to this person articulate the hardships that they're going through, that's the very reason why I watch this person because I'm actively interested in seeing them overcome the very things that I'm talking about. And this is the first time I've talked about it. With this person in mind, I want this person to succeed. I want this person to grow. I want this person to feel accomplished and overcome a lot of mental barriers. And listen, just listen and take the good advice and run with it. You don't, you don't even have to thank me. You don't have to go and say, I listened to you and it worked. Just listen and just do it. Okay. But Patrick Whelan, he posted a video last night and I watched it early this morning and I, I posted a response and it hasn't made its way to his comment section. And I noticed the other day I was in his chat window and none of my posts were making it there. So, uh, apparently I made my way on his ban list and I'm not sure why, but I've always been encouraging to him. But he posted a video and this is the very type of video I like watching from him. Um, usually he's very flamboyant, very, um, much of a braggart and does a lot of talking and, and it's great. It's, he has a lot of showmanship, but he admitted Where he was in his position of being in a funded account, he showed where he is. Financially where, you know, he had this much and this is where he's at. He's losing, he's losing, he's losing. And I'm not encouraging you to go over there and talk any kind of smack. I'm not telling you to go over there and troll him. I'm telling you that that's the very thing that this industry needs. That type of stuff where individuals come out and say, Hey, this is hard. This is what I'm going through. This is what I got to work through. And yeah, I can make a lot of money. But then I ended up losing it and I don't know the answers yet. You do know the answers, Patrick, but what you're doing is what social media, YouTuber, Twitter, Instagram traders do is they're trying to be the biggest profitable person, the biggest profitable, the, the, the standout from a crowd type person. And that's a, that's a, a big pitfall. Because if you're always trying to be the gold medalist, unless you're Michael Phelps, a freak of nature, you know, the chances of you being like that consistently, I mean look at he did a real good run of it but he's, did he do it again and again and again and again? No. It has a short, it has a short lifespan. It looks great when it happens. It feels great. And the viewers that don't have experience, They think that, okay, you've done this, you need to keep doing it this way. If you don't do it this way, then you're a fraud. Then you can't trade. When it's the very factors that you're placing on yourself that are unrealistic, trying to live up to other people's expectation, you end up either trying to trade your P& L, which is you're trading your profit and loss. Equity curve, which should never be done. But 90 percent of the time, I'll just go out and say it's 99 percent of the time, especially with funded account traders, you know, they freak out. They think that the losing trade it is took, or even if they hit maximum loss in it, they are forced to stop trading. That's the beginning and the end. So you might as well just recklessly trade the rest one, the rest of it, and then start a brand new one. You're still met with the same problem. You have to get to the funded state. You have to get to a profitable state and you have to be able to eventually withdraw money. Otherwise, why are you doing it? If you're not in this to trade and make money, and it's irrelevant what other people think is an amount of money that's significant or insignificant. It doesn't matter because you're, they're not going to, you're not going to give what you made. You're not going to give that money to anyone. They're not going to spend your money just the same way. You're not going to spend theirs, but you're all pocket watching. I got people in the comment section saying, you know, why don't you show us your real setups? I am. Why don't you do this live in front of us? I'm not going to do that because I know many of you are reckless. You'll over leverage. You won't, you won't have the wherewithal to hold the stock where I place it because you're over leveraged. You'll hurt yourself and then you'll blame me. And I didn't do anything to do except for do what I'm doing right now and or other people will do it. Get credit from having an amazing trade paying out and they'll be able to pretend that they can do what I'm doing and they'll start mentorships and fleece people and take them and take advantage of them. I don't need to do that. Just watch what I do on Robin's Cup next year. That's all I'm gonna say. Just watch what I do next year. Okay. That's all you got to worry about. You're going to have all the things to talk about next year, but having unrealistic expectations of yourself, especially if you're an influencer or trying to be an influencer or a YouTuber, the ones that I like are the ones that come out and say, you know what, these are the hardships I went through, and this is what I'm still wrestling with. You know what? That's someone that listened to. That's someone to listen to because they're not hiding that part. They don't owe anything to you. They owe nothing to you, but they're being candid enough to say, Hey, look, you see this, you see that I got paid out from this company. I took a withdrawal from my live account. That's not a prop funded account. It's my actual trading. I showed you broker statements. I logged in and showed you three months of my trading, win, loss, everything. You're not obligated. I'm not obligated, rather, to share any of that. None of these individuals on YouTube or on social media are obligated to show you anything. But this expectation, this unrealistic expectation that everybody needs to sit down and prove to you who was no one Tom, Dick, and Harry showing up from the position of anonymity, you owe me a full explanation of everything. I don't owe you shit. And neither does anybody else. And you coming up as a trader, you, you owe no one else anything. None of you are spending my money. None of you are sleeping in my house. You're not going to drive in my cars. You're not going to go on vacations with me. I'm not going to have presents with your name under, under my fucking tree. Okay. None of those things are going to happen, but in this world today, everybody expects everybody to give them stuff, information, details, things that are not. In any way, shape or form realistic to be expected. If I was running or if anyone else is running a signal service, then absolutely you better have something. Show me what you're doing. Then that makes sense. It makes perfect sense. But all of you are in a rush to be in a position where other people are going to demand information from you, details that you're not obligated to give. You're not obligated. You're absolutely not obligated. But the mindset today is this is what it should be. And if you don't want to dance to the beat of my drum, then you're a fraud. Go fuck yourself. Okay. Go back here. And, uh, second one, peer driven performance. Now I have a lot to do with this because when I show examples, uh, other people, they're intimidated by that because they, they don't trade that way. They many times don't even use a stop loss and they don't know where to do a partial. They don't know where the market's going to go. And they're just really just getting into a trade to find out what happens. And to me, that's, you know, on a hope and a prayer type trading, they might be profitable because honestly you can flip a quarter and trade heads and tails. And if you got really, really good risk management and you risk very little, you can make money. I wouldn't sleep at night trading like that, but you can make money. So if, if you feel like you are another person on, on social media and you feel like, because my community or maybe some of the things I say, um, if you listen to what I'm saying, I attack retail theology because it's flawed. It really is. I don't care what you're going to say about it in response. You're making money because you're a good risk manager, not because of Wyckoff, not because of supply and demand, not because of Elliott Wave. You're making money because of good Risk management. That's all. Because none of that stuff makes the market go up or down. Buying and selling pressure, depth of market, DOM, market profile, all of that is horseshit. It's bullshit. But I know people, I know personally, people that make lots of money and they attribute their success to that. But that stuff is an alignment. When they're profitable with the things that I teach, which is the reality of the marketplace, the market's going to seek yield. It's going to run for inefficiency for the purposes of making that market efficiently delivered. That's a fair value gap. In other words, or it's going to run for liquidity. That's it. That's all that's happening. And when it's not doing that, it's going to consolidate. That's it. There are going to be times when the market has a manual intervention. When you're going to see that interest rates. Employment data, an unexpected geopolitical event, something wartime, something, you know, something completely unexpected. And they'll go in, they'll do something where any one of us could lose money. And there's nothing that can be done to save you from that. That's the underlying inherent risks, the trading. And most of you are unaware that those types of things are going to happen. And you have to be aware of that. So when you're trading your account and you're trying to use the maximum leverage. Okay, you're doing that with the expectation that you're going to have the best outcome. When I'm telling you as a trader, especially for folks that have not yet found consistency or profitability, that's the worst thing to do. That's the worst thing to do. Just because Topstep or any other company out there says you can trade with this number of contracts, that's not what a professionally minded trader will do. It's an IQ test. It's available. You can do that. Just like your acceleration pedal on your car says, yeah, it can be pressed all the way to the floor. If you hold it there long enough, your car will go as fast as it will go until it can't go further forward. By accident. By a lane change that is not accessible and you're gonna hit a brick wall or something. Just because it can go fast. Just because you can go you know, 0 60 in a couple seconds. Doesn't mean that you on the road you're trading, you're trading, not trading, that you're traveling on should be done. In your neighborhood, with your neighbors, with small children out there playing on their bicycles, just because your car can go 0 to 60 in 2. 3 seconds, is that efficiently done? Safely done? Is it the right thing to do in front of your house? When those children of your neighbors or your children are out front doing it. No, of course not. That's poor risk management, but there are people that do those types of things and they get away with it and they get a high off of that. And they take that same mindset and they apply it to their trading. And you see that thing happening, that, that state of mind, that, that peer driven performance. People that have little dick energy will go out there and say, Oh yeah, this guy over here doesn't know how to trade. I'm going to be in a competition with them. Really not in a competition, but we're going to compete my results against theirs. That's one of the worst things you can do. Because all you have to do is sit back and watch them. They hurt themselves. Why? Because it's peer driven performance. That's not how they would really trade. That's not how they would trade and you shouldn't trade that way. And social media and peer driven performance, trying to measure up against the next guy, Oh, this is, Oh, it's demo. Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to try to do it with a real account and I'm going to try to maximize this and really trade unlike I normally would. And then wreck yourself in front of everybody and do so much damage to your own brand. That's, that's a poor decision. That's a poor decision. Those things should not be done. Just because I can sit there all day long and buy and sell, up, down, up, down, up, down, all day long in any given market, doesn't mean that I'm gonna need to do it. I don't, I can sleep at night knowing that I don't have to do that every single day for you. I'm content with not having to do party tricks, okay? I don't need to perform for you. I do it because I want to do it. I do it, I have done it in the past to thumb my nose at people that say this stuff doesn't work, but never be sucked into this peer driven performance and many social media, YouTuber traders get tied up in all that stuff. I've been steady Eddie going forward. And I just looked at the following on the, on the YouTube channel and I'm, I got under 25, 000 to under 24, 000 more. And I'm at the million mark. So thank you very, very much for that, by the way. And it's very intimidating to know that that many people are listening to me. Maybe not at one time, but that's a lot of people. You ever think about that? A million people. Listening to a kid from Middle River, Maryland. That's weird. But anyway, one of the other factors is obviously you want to, you want to trade to be an influence on social media. Maybe not necessarily be in competition with other influencers, but you want to rise to the occasion as a social media influencer. That's a pitfall because again, you're trying to trade for notoriety. For the sake of being a celebrity versus I'm trying to trade so I can make money. I'm trying to trade so I don't have to go back to having to have a job. I'm trying to leave a employment that may be very beneficial to me and my family. May help. They may offer all kinds of insurances. They may offer all kinds of benefits. But guess what? If you can trade profitably, you can afford those things too. And it's a tax write off for you. See, it's a tax write off for your employer to give that to you. When you're in, when you're self employed. You can create all these other income streams. Whereas a lot of things like writing off a lot of specific things, trading in itself can't do that. It's not legal to do that. It's not like you can't write off your commissions. You can't write off commissions. That's something you just can't deduct that. Well, if you create a secondary entertainment, Um, an educational type thing or a vlog where you just basically share your life and experience as a trader. Well, guess what? Everything you do now, you can go out to eat. 50 percent of everything you spend on food is a write off unless you do catering, which is 100 percent write off. You can go and show your homes. You can show your cars, your boats, your ATVs, your travel expenses are 100 percent write off. When I go and I travel, I stay at the nicest place all the time. And I, if they have hotels that have the restaurants, I want to be in those highest end restaurants and I don't care about what it costs. I don't care about tipping lavishly because all of that's going to lower my taxable income that's coming through that secondary income stream. So all these things, I get paid to drive my Corvettes. That I own. I don't rent them. I don't lease them. Okay. My 2019, I started that as a company lease. I paid $1,300 a month for it. When the lease was finished, I bought it outright. I still have it. If you wanna see it, I'll take it for a ride, , but I own all my cars. Okay. But I maximized the writing off of it. And then for the car, like the 2021, I depreciate it. The RV that I pay, I paid almost $300,000 for. I'm in depreciation on that. I show it. It's part of my lifestyle. When I'm out gallivanting around in it and I'm making videos, I'm working from it. So I'm paid to have that vehicle. Whereas if you go out and you're working at a good career job and you're doing all this wonderful stuff, and even if you do very well, you can't write off those types of things. When you buy a car, you are eating it. When you put gas in your car, you're eating it. That's a write off for me. Why? Because I have a social media presence. See the difference? Why do I do this? Because I'm financially illiterate, you dumb fucks. The people that sit on the sidelines talking, oh, why does he have a YouTube? He's so, uh, profitable. Because the tax treatment in this, you can't do that with your trading. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You're fucking stupid. Read a book, man. The bottom line is, there's a different way of living when you're financially illiterate. Everything that people do that you don't understand because you're fucking broke. And you're critiquing other people, not just me, anyone else. You're, you're literally broke. You have no idea what you're talking about. You're not have, you don't have any capacity to understand the benefits of being an entrepreneur outside of trading. There's so many benefits that this industry can provide for you. If you learn how to trade, you don't have to be making lots of money trading. You just got to know how to trade. And be profitable if it replaces your job, well, guess what? Then you can be in a position to be in social media and let that income stream provide, and it could be very, very profitable, very profitable. I've said this very candidly. I've made millions, millions and millions of millions more as an educator than I did as a trader. Because look how many people follow me. Think about that. Do the math. You're mathematically challenged if you can't see that. I haven't taken millions of trades in my lifetime. I haven't done that. I haven't taken millions of trades. Do the fucking math here, folks. You're, you're learning a skill set that opens the doors to so many other possible income streams and benefits by, by doing those very things. For someone to sit on the sidelines and say, Oh, if he's so rich, blah, blah. I was rich before I did a lot of stuff. But now, when an accountant sits down and says, hey, you know, if you do this, you, you can reduce your taxable income. Okay, so what if I do this, this, and this, this? Yeah, you end up paying 25, 000 a year in taxes. What? Yeah, 25, 000 for federal and something for Maryland, but your income is 500, 000. You can't do that with your fucking jobs, man. You can go to college all you want. You'll never do that with your college education jobs. You'll never do it. And it's absolutely 100 percent legal. It's not tax evasion. It's the proper use of the tax code. And it is what it is. And people are going to hate you because you're going to live a better lifestyle than them. And you're going to pay less taxes than them. And they're going to work next fucking Monday. All from what you're learning to do in these markets. So yeah, you should, if you have the aspiration to, to have another income stream, you should tap into social media. You should do those things, but it shouldn't be the driving force behind it. You need to know how to do this. Well, trading, learning how to trade. Well, that's how you fortify this because guess what you can do with this. You can do a signal service if you're inclined to do that. And that is extremely profitable. I did a social media experiment on Twitter before I left it. I said, um, knowing what I do and seeing how I trade, if I was able to show this to you in a live setting. You're a part of a community, but I'm going to charge you 500 a month. I'm not doing this folks. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, this is what it's like. I had thousands of people in the first day. And I don't even know what the Twitter, uh, the tweet is now where people were like, yeah, I want to sign up. I still get emails. Every day. I wish I wouldn't have done it now. But people are like, hey, I want to sign up to your signal service. I don't have a signal service. I'm not on Instagram. There's people over there claiming they have the official Instagram account of me. No, I did open an account. It was hacked and I said fuck them. I'm not gonna go back on air again. If they're gonna, if they're gonna let that happen and I'm not worried about it. I don't need to be on Instagram. I'm right here. This is my social media presence right here. YouTube. I can talk through you, uh, I'll talk to you through the community posts and I can do live streams. Okay, it's the same thing I was doing over at Twitter. Nothing is so time sensitive that you need to have it right away tweaked like it was over there. But social media can be an income stream that you can maximize and you get the tax benefits that you can't get as a trader. You can make lots and lots and lots of money trading, yes, but you can't write your boat off. You can't write your cars off. You can't write your food off. You can't do all those types of things. But if you have a secondary income stream where your presence online, and it could be a very subtle where you're not even that active, you just share things. You're not actually teaching anything. Say, here's a trade I took. Okay. If you have a following, the purpose of you showing what your lifestyle is like, as soon as you start showing your personal things, that becomes part of your image, your clothing, your housing, all those things, your, your utilities. Part of that becomes an expense that you can write off. Your home office, they give you a percentage that you can write. And obviously I can't write off my whole home, but there's a, there's a square footage that my accountant works out where this is what we say that you can write off as part of a deduction. And you work towards all those types of things all year long. And everything I spend is maximized. And if I can't write it off, Generally, I won't buy it. I won't spend money on it. See that? That's financial literacy. Just because I have a lot of fucking money doesn't mean I go out there and blow it like some stupid ass. Buying up stuff, spending money just cause you can, is stupidity. But when you spend your money to be paid using the very things that you're buying and spending your money on, You look at how many cars I have. Well, you're not showing any Lamborghinis. You're not showing any, uh, McLarens. I can't drive those cars in these streets up here because it'll beat them to death. Two, I already worry with the Corvettes that I have because I don't want to get out of them and leave them because people in the world are assholes because they'll come down and they'll key it. I've had it happen before. I would not feel comfortable leaving a McLaren anywhere. It just wouldn't happen. So, you know, this is, these are opinions from people that are broke. They probably don't even have a fucking car to run around on a fucking bicycle. They stole two blocks from fucking where you live at. These Mindsets are flawed thinking. They're toxic thinking and when you do get on the social media, even if you can trade well, even if you do open up your trading platform, you log in with the password and you go through day by day statements. They're gonna say that you never showed live trading. They're gonna say you don't make money. They're gonna say that it's all fake. These people are fucking idiots, but you're gonna dance to their drumbeat. I don't. I don't. I pull strings and I make them dance. And I make them watch themselves break their own brand in front of everybody. All with the intent that they're gonna try to destroy the downfall of ICT. This is a fucking amazing downfall. I'm rolling uphill without any effort. See, see what happens? When you know what you're doing and you're out here trying to help other people, you can't beat that. You can't beat that. You can't defeat it. You can talk all the stuff that you want, but it never can beat it. It can't be diminished, it can't be tarnished, they can photoshop, they can make all the bullshit up they want, okay? You see me living in a fucking shack? No. Nope. You see me unable to show you executions? Every fucking day. Every single day I'm laying them out there. Just twisting the knife, just twisting it ever so slowly, ICT. I have fun with social media, but most of you don't have the, the thick skin that I have. I can take a lot of stuff. Many of you can't and you'll be tore up from it and it'll influence your trading decisions. And then you'll wrestle with trading where you've never had that problem before when it was private, when it was just you and your trading statements, what you did in the privacy of your own decision making, those types of things. You want to, you want to hold onto that moment in your trading as long as you possibly can, even if you want to be in social media eventually, because you want to be able to lean on that. That is a very strong fortress of solitude knowing that you don't have to be in social media. I don't need to be in social media. I stepped away from Twitter. Like I said, I would, but I said, I would be here. Some of you don't like that. Some of you want me to go back over to Twitter. I'm not going back over to Twitter, but everything that you do should be driven with it. Mindset that you are focused primarily on keeping your trading excellent, your efficiency, your execution and entry, your stock placement, your trade management, you're not over leveraging, you're not trying to do the maximum outcome, and you're worried about capital preservation. Number one, first and foremost, is you're not trying to risk money needlessly. For the sake of being in there and seeing what happens. Cause I'm going to save you some money and time and heartache. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to lose your ass. And that one trade is going to cause you to go into a tailspin and you're going to blow your account trying to rush to get it back. It happens all the time, just don't do it, period. And finally, lead dog pitfall. Everybody wants to be the lead dog. Everybody over here on Twitter right now is clamoring to be the person everyone wants to talk about. It's silly, isn't it? And I'm not even over there anymore and they're still bringing my name up. Here's the problem with this. Okay. If you don't have the re the real skill to be lead dog, you're going to be the one that tries to pretend to be lead dog. But guess what? Lead dog is the first one that falls into this. The pit, the snare, runs into the, the, the obstacle that needs to determine what's the next pathway. Because you have a large following behind you, or you're trying to build one, and you got to know where you're going. And most people out there pretending to be lead dog, they love having their asses sniffed, but they have no idea where they're going. They have no idea where they're going. So don't try, I don't try to be lead dog. I don't try to be legal. I just, I'm, I'm me, and when I see bullshit, I'm gonna call it bullshit. I'm gonna tell you what works and what doesn't work for me. And if I say I like something or I don't like something, don't be so closed minded and say, well, ICC said he doesn't like it, so therefore I'm gonna think like him. That's the stupidest thing in the world to do. That is cult like. Be critical. If I say I don't like something, you know, if it doesn't bother you, then just dismiss it. That's your opinion. It's wonderful. I didn't ask for it, but okay, we heard you. But if I say, I don't like something, and this is the reason why I don't like it. Don't subscribe to that viewpoint just simply because I said that I made those mistakes as a martial artist, as a young man, as a child, listening to martial arts, I liked, I looked up to, and they would say certain things. I'm like, okay, I'm going to think like you. And then I found out that I couldn't hold that opinion of. And when I, when I first started trading and learning how to trade, um, everybody I read a book of, you know, I hung on every word that they wrote or said. Larry Williams was the one that I basically, I'm going to be honest with you, you know, when I read his, How I Made a Million Dollar Trading Commodities last year, and listened to those first four pages, I was convinced that this guy was a billionaire. I'm not a billionaire, and some of you think I pool fucking trillions of dollars out of my ass all the time. I'm not. The facts are, you need to be an independent thinker, and you might have heroes. You might have people you look up to, but never meet them, because the pedestal you put them on, They're undeserving of it. I'm undeserving of what many of you think of me. I am a sinning foul mouthed person that wrestles with mental illness. Do you want to learn from me? See how hard of a sell that is? So I had to make videos, edit out those character flaws in me. So that way you could get past that to see that this is what you should focus on while learning how to trade. I've been there. I've hurt myself. I've made lots of money and I've lost lots of money. So you tell me. Do you want to make the same fucking mistakes that I've done when you can avoid it? Here's what you can avoid doing. Don't do this. Don't do that. Do these things. This is what helped me and I have students that are making money because they listen to this information. They follow it. Where's the, where's the, uh, the faulty in that? There's no, there's no faulty logic in it. It's based on real experience. It's based on an unadulterated, uh, completely candid, I did my own ass in trading other stupid shit that has no bearing on why price is going to go up or down. So my whole life was, how do I fortify those weak points in the fear, the triggering moments of, what did I fear most about trading? Not knowing how to get in. I have so many ways to get into a trade now. It's unrealistic for you to have to have that many ways to get in. But I, that was a real thing for me. I, it was a phobia. I don't hide my mental illness. I don't hide it from you. When I was on baby pips, I was trying to hide it. I was trying very, very hard to hide it because I was afraid of it being used against me and people still do. But I, you know, I can't change it. I can't fix it. So I have to wrestle with it and live with it. I'm a real person, just like you are. I have real things going on in my personal life that I have to worry about and wrestle with. I have children that don't want to listen to me just like you do. Or if you have children or will have children, you'll have that experience too. They're not going to do what you tell them to do, which is good advice. Don't do this. Don't do that. If you get a flat tire, tell my daughter, don't drive home, just tell me where you're at and I'll get it taken care of. And they drive home, they tear up the tire completely and they ruin the rim. Ugh. I told you don't drive it. Yeah, but I didn't want to sit where I was sitting. You were completely safe in a shopping center. It was daytime. Come on, right? It's common sense, but you know what it's like when you don't listen. I tell you, don't trade on nonfarm payroll Friday days. And what do you do? I want to see what happens. And then you're sending me emails. I wish I would have listened. So, I mean, I get it. I mean, I get it. You want to be the exception, but that lead dog pitfall, that it ain't never going to happen to you and you're going to be the one that rises to the occasion and you're going to have all the answers. Man, I prematurely thought I had all the answers in the nineties. I thought I had them all figured out then and I didn't. And I started teaching way before I knew what the hell I was doing. And I was discovering things while teaching that were actual weaknesses on me. And then I had to fortify those weak areas in my trading with protocols, processes, things that fill in the blank that I had a real phobia about. And the thing primarily was, how do I know when to buy? Cause I didn't want to be a short seller. So I had to figure out what were the catalysts that make me feel confident that I can buy that market, knowing that it's not likely to drop. So if I can figure out when to time that, all I have to do is sit around and wait for those conditions. And then when I do press the button. I'm just going to hold on to it until it bends to my will. That became the secondary thing. I would force my will on the marketplace. So I had to learn that. Even though I might have all those things in line that says I have a good buying opportunity and it's meeting all the criteria that I had at the time, which was myopic. Don't think that I had it figured out back then because I didn't. It was the early stages of me just falling in love with being right. That's a problem. But at the time, you think that they're strengths. You think that they are the characteristics that make you a warrior. You're going to go out there. No one's going to hold you back. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to beat everybody else's results. I'm going to be the person. I'm going to be lead dog. And I put myself through so much shit, losing accounts, blowing accounts, losing wonderful wins, work for a whole month building up equity, no losing days, none. And then one day that starts off picture perfect. I put the trade on, bond starts shitting the bed. I'm long, like what the hell is this? All right. It's just dropping against me a little bit. I'm going to buy more of it. Oh, it's dropping a little bit more. I don't know where to place the stop loss, but I'm right. So let me take the stop loss off. Well, you knew the end of that. The account blown. I wrestled, arm wrestled the entire day from the opening bell of bonds, trying to be long on a day that opened at the high and just kept going down. Never had one tick above the opening price. And I was wrestling with that. As a 20 year old, when you think your shit doesn't stink, you're the cock of the walk. You made money all month long, no losing days. The Friday that ends the trading of that month, all that's gone and the account that's demoralizing. That's demoralizing. And that people that come up in this industry and they tell you they, they fucking never blew an account. They're full of fucking shit. They are liars. They are liars. There's no progeny that walks out there in this world. They were touched by the grace of God and they've never blown an account. That's never happened. It's never happened like that. Everybody, everybody has done that. Anybody that claims they never have done that, they are liars, or they just started, just wait around because it's going to happen. It's human nature, folks. You do this long enough, you're going to think that you figured it all out, and then when you find out that you don't have it right, you want to use the magic eraser and get rid of that red day, and you're willing to do anything. You're willing to pay any commission level. Right, Vinny? To try to get back to even. You'll spend 6, 500 on commissions just so you don't have a losing day. I used to do stuff like that. I used to do that stupid shit. I used to do it. But there's a better way. There's a more efficient, less stress way to do it. It's going to require effort. It's going to take diligence and organization. And a level of commitment to following rules that you're usually not used to doing. Which makes this business very, very hard. You want to have it easy trading will and can be easy. It is, it really is easy. If you're waiting for the choices days, the trade where the market structure is so in favor of running to a specific pool of liquidity or inefficiency, everything moving in one tandem direction. Everything being symmetrical, everything being so telegraphed that it's going to do this very thing. All you have to do is simply wait for it. Those conditions is what I taught you. The problem is you're trying to force that just because you're sitting in front of the charts. ICT said the silver bull happens between 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock. So I'm sitting down and it's 1001, so I'm looking to take a trade. Where's the, where's the problem there? You're forcing it. You're chomping at the bit. And your desire is forcing you to invite your will on the market. You already see yourself being accomplished in finding the right setup because you know it's coming, but you might be looking at a two minute chart and it might not really be there. You might be looking at the one minute chart and it might not be there. And it materializes on a 15 second chart. Oh man, see he's always got an out. No, I have lots of ways to get in. And my silver bullet may not be on the one minute chart. It may have been on a 30 second chart. I may have missed the exit. I'm sorry, the entry point on a silver bullet that I really would have been better suited to enter because I was chasing a puppy or I walked away to grab a drink. Or, you know, there's packages left in front of my door. I've got to bring them in. Cause my wife's saying I'm not home right now. And I just got an alert saying that Amazon dropped off packages. Please, please bring them in. Like we live in a bad neighborhood, right? So these are all distractions and because I'm watching a very small timeframe, that point at which I'm trying to enter may have, I may have missed it. Oh, that's big. No big deal. If I miss it on one minute chart, I'll drop down to a 30 second, 15 second and five second chart. And then I'll use a fair value gap on that. I'm not missing the move folks. I'm not going to miss the majority run of whatever I'm looking for. I may miss that pristine entry point and see for some of you while you're new, you think because you missed that point of entry, it's done. When I tell you, if you miss it to simply wait and watch it, that's teaching you patience. You don't have that. When you first start, you don't have patience because you're trying to chase the lead dog, whether it be me, somebody else that's saying they making money and someone else is doing something on our live stream. Someone else is doing signal service. Someone else is doing whatever. You're constantly trying to run when it's better for you in the beginning to learn, to sit still, observe. How are you thinking about the marketplace? Do you feel like You know, insatiable desire that you've got to be in there today. Come hell or high water, even if you only get five handles of the the 30 handle run, if you just get a piece of it, you know, at least you got something. You took a, you took a bite of the, uh, you know, the, the, the beast that you've been hunting. That's a hyena's approach. You know, I, I, I don't, I don't trade like a hyena. I'm not out there cackling and making crazy noises and shit, trying to just get a snap, a bite of something. I'm out there literally stalking and waiting. And when I see the weak one in the herd, the Judas swing, to see the retail traders thinking that they got something, it's easy money for them. If that's 100%. Diametrically opposed to what I'm anticipating in price, I'm running that fucker down. And I'm going home with a full belly. And I'm not second guessing it. I'm not worrying about what other people are doing, what they think is making the market go up or down, what the volume profile said, what volume node they're looking at, what point of control, what VWAP, what fucking supply and demand zone, what Elliott wave count is. I don't give a fuck about none of that stuff. I know exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not worried about anything else. I'm dialed in. I know exactly what I'm hunting. I got my eyes set on it and I'm going to run it down and I'm taking it home. That's not arrogance. That's not narcissism. That's absolutely defined as confidence because I've been here enough times to know that what I'm doing works. I don't need to change it. I don't need to look at somebody else to help me make it better. I'm not looking at any retail logic because it's not even in there. I'm attacking that. I am Apex Predator is attacking the weakest form of trader in this industry at a time when they're making their actions known. This is what I'm going to do. Mr. Six months of experience, and that's not a knock against anyone that has little experience, but if someone's going to be so courteous enough to say, Hey, I believe this is what's going to happen. Where do they come? Where do they come? Like where they, where they congregate and meet up on live streamers, live streams, that's a beautiful resource. It's a beautiful resource. You should encourage them to do it. Show up. That's what I'm doing. When I talk about Top Step, when I talk about Patrick Whelan, when I talk about Trades by Matt, and there's a couple other people I won't mention, they have really, really opinionated chat windows. And when I say things like that, it's very easy for people to have a, uh, An issue with me, they want to try to paint me in a different light. I'm telling you that market sentiment is a thing. It's real. Okay. If you go to Topstep, they're basically telling you that they're looking at their traders and how many are net long, how many net short. Are they assholes for making that available? No, I think it's great. It's absolutely great information. It doesn't mean that that's a selling signal or a buy signal. It's just, that's a good sentiment read, but the better one is what they're saying in that chat window. Because if I already know that predominantly most traders. Are offside. Okay. Whether trading in the top step company, but they're trading in other companies. Um, I just can't think of any other companies name, but, um, if this resource is made available to you, it's like a watering hole, just like on the, on the, uh, the plains of Africa. Okay. I'm this fucking cheetah. I'm hungry. I'm trying to get a fucking meal today. So I'm looking out here in the, in the dry. Landscape in front of me. I want to get something to eat. So where am I going to go? I'm going to go through the fucking drive thru. Where's that at? The watering hole. So they go out there and they lay down in the brush and they watch all the animals go out there and they get a drink. Eventually one's going to walk over there with a bum leg, but they have the opinion that they're safely going to make it to the watering hole, get a drink, and live on the rest of the day. That's what their sentiment is. And they're making it known to everybody by walking out there publicly. Well, as the same mindset as these individuals that share their opinion, they're going to these, these watering holes. To me, that tells you it's a pretty safe bet that they're probably very new to trading. And if they're very chatty, the same names that keep coming up, they're the ones that absolutely don't know what the fuck they're talking about because they can't shut up. They're chatty. The chattiest ones that show their opinion, start paying attention to those individuals. Online too, not just simply in chat windows. On Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, whatever, whatever resource. If you're in Discord, I don't go to any of those types of things. And for clarity also, I don't have Facebook. I do not have Instagram. I am not on Discord. You're not going to talk to me on Telegram. I don't have any other social media where you're going to be able to engage with me. Except for my YouTube channel. That's it. There's nothing else. If you see anybody else pretending to be me, they're fucking liars. And if they're asking for money, it ain't me. So, by watching these individuals online, and when they share their opinion about what's gonna happen, or if they co sign someone else's opinion, if that is diametrically opposed, that means it's opposite to what I think's gonna happen in a day. If I think it's going to be a bullish day, it's going to run for some, some buy side liquidity above an old high or relatively equal highs. Or if I think it's going to reach up to an old fair value gap, if that's what I'm holding to as my expectation on the day, I'm going to side with that all the time. I've got 30 years of doing this. These individuals are hanging out in the chat windows of these prop firm companies. Chances are they're probably not long term traders. The chances of them being profitable is very slim. And they're in there because they want other people. To tell them what they should do because they don't know what they're doing, but because they want to be part of something, the mindset is this. If I start talking a lot, it's going to feel like I'm part of the crew, but really what you're doing is you're running out to that wording hole with a bum leg and part of your ass missing. That means I'm going to run you down. Easy. You're an easy meal for me. Dollar menu. Here you go. Real cheap, easy meal. And if you're telling the world, On that stage that this is what you think is going to happen. You're going to make it to that watering hole and get to live the rest of the day. I'm going to be there at that watering hole eating your ass. Okay. I'm going to devour you right there. You're done. I'm fed. You're done. It's a mercy killing. That's how I look at it. I don't have a problem with it. I don't wrestle with it morally. It is the way it is. The food chain is what it is. You're either an apex predator or your ass is prey. And I'm not getting eaten by nobody. Nope. I'm going to sharpen my claws every day. I'm going to keep my teeth sharpest, longest, and I want to make sure I eat. So how do you do that? You couple yourself with the weakest form of trader and counterparty. That's the whole essence of what sentiment is. That's what the benefit of market sentiment is looking for the weakest mindset in the most apt to be wrong to be Suggesting a direction that is opposed to what you with more experience More track record, more accuracy is against. When that arm wrestling match is going on between smart money, someone that's been doing it for a very long time. And think about it. There is nothing out there in the world that would ever entice me to go out there and grab a golf club and spend a whole afternoon trying to put a ball in a fucking hole. I know I can't do that. I know I can't do it. I'm not going to hang around people that do it. I'm not going to waste my time doing it. And I sure as hell I'm not going to watch it on TV. But people do it. They love it. Okay, so if I was go out there and try to golf against like Tiger Woods, and I would look like an idiot There was there's no way I would even do that Okay, but that's the equivalent in my mind when I see someone that is green. They're brand new They have no idea what you're talking about or doing and they're not profitable But they're always chatting it up what they think the mark's gonna do Just sit back for a week and watch them. You'll see the people that do it When the market is poised based on what I teach, it's near perfect setups. It's near perfect. I use them like a retail squawk box. And some of you are sending comments to me and you say I'm a dick, I'm an asshole, I'm a narcissistic prick because I'm saying this. I'm giving you an advantage. Like it's a real time advantage because people are creatures of habit. If the people that are doing it and they realize they're listening and they're thinking, shit, I'm not going to do that anymore. It doesn't matter. PT Barnum said it. There's a sucker born every second. And guess what? Somebody else is going to fill that void. You're going to start talking to, because they want to feel a part of something. And really what they want is someone to say, Oh yeah, I agree with you. Think about it. They want someone to say, yeah, that's the right idea. And then they feel like they're accomplished. They're not taking any trades. They're not pushing any buttons. They're not even trading a demo account, but now what do they feel? A sense of comradery, some sense of community. It gives them a purpose, which is the problem in the world right now, because there is a lack of sense of self worth. Think about it. A lot of my students that follow me on YouTube, a lot of them have never had a fatherly figure in their life. They've never had anybody believe in them. Nobody's ever encouraged them, and I'm doing those types of things. That's why you feel like there is this rapport between us. You feel like I'm talking just to you because you came with a void that needed to be filled. And because I have a genuine interest in all of you succeeding, I'm not gonna pull any punches. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. Cause if you were my son or daughter, you would hear it just like this. You would hear it just like this. I want you to know what it's going to be like. It's going to be hard. It's going to be taxing. It's going to be an arduous task. It's going to be very, very difficult to go through in the beginning, but it's worth it because once you get this skill set, all you gotta do is wait around in the morning, in the late evening at the watering hole, that's the kill zones. The master of analogies. I'm never going to run short of it. This baker never runs out of yeast. But all of these pitfalls, they're going to plague you and your development in the beginning. And then the longer you hold on to these types of thinking, and ignoring the benefits of listening to someone that's been doing it longer and better than you. Like, here we are, it's a Saturday, folks. I'm investing in you. I'm giving you one of my secret weapons. What I'm doing when I listen to these live streamers, and they like to joke, I'm here to get codes for resets. Ask Michael Patok if I've ever done anything with trying to get an account with them. Never. Won't ever happen either. I'm not there to learn how to trade. I'm not there watching Patrick Wheeling learn how to trade. I'm not watching Trades by Matt to learn how to trade. I love, uh, Trades by Matt, his attitude on everything. He's chill as shit. He's got no drama with him. He's just, just hanging out. Never has anything bad about anybody else. And he just does whatever he does. Win, lose, whatever. It is what it is. He's just, how you gonna hate the guy? You know, I think he should listen to me too. I mean, the same advice I mentioned. In the post that I made to Pat, and I hope he He allows it to post because it was encouraging and it wasn't anything to be Speaking down to him and I don't want anybody to think that you know He's a target that should be trolled even though he talks about me a lot. You know, it's shop talk folks I I don't take any of that kind of stuff unless you talk about my family and make up bullshit about me I got no time for you. You're an asshole. Okay, fuck you You make up bullshit try to get some ad revenue get the buck out of here Join the robin's cup inning because i'm telling you i'm gonna beat your fucking ass in that Okay. I'm going to rip your fucking head off and shove it straight up your fucking ass. But apart from that dickhead, I don't have any problems with anybody else. I have no problems with anybody. I can take shop talk a good ribbing from other people. It's fun. It's fun. When someone like Patrick comes out and says, Hey, this is what I'm struggling with right now. That, that right there, that garners respect because he doesn't need to make that public. He's not, he's not obligated to share that level of detail, but yet he did. And I respect that. That's the kind of stuff that needs to be shown. That kind of thing needs to be revealed and say, Hey, look, it's not easy. It's not easy at all. And I would never try to punt a person that's doing that. I would never try to knock against somebody that's doing that because they're not trying to deceive you. They're telling, they're showing you basically I'm trying my best. And this is where I'm at right now. And I'm struggling, man, that takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of respect for your audience to say, Hey, look, um, I don't want you to look at me and see this when in reality I have this. Cause it's, if someone is doing the opposite of that, that's a real piece of shit. That's a real piece of shit that tries to hide it, but pretends that they're better than they really are. This, this type of video, you know, it's the most one, I think he said, I'm down really bad or something like that. It's his, it's his most, at least at the time of this recording, it's Saturday, 10 o'clock in the morning. Um, it's a real short video, 12 minutes, you know, like if you're a student of mine, you probably run it at two times the speed, it'll take you six minutes to get through it. But he, he covers a lot of things that I have preached hard and fast for a long, long time are going to be the very barriers. That you're going to have if you do what he's been trying to do. And in short, this is what I have said in his live streams, communicating to him. And I've made posts directly to him in his comment sections on certain videos. And I've tried to encourage him to do things like what I'm talking about here today. He has a following. His following would grow exponentially if he stayed on track by doing what he did today or last night, showing adversities because that allows the audience members To build a rapport, saying, you know what, I'm not the only one that's struggling right now. And because he has a built in audience that like him, I like him from his, his showmanship. I look at him as a Randy Macho Man Savage WWF character. You know, I don't take anything that he says as serious. I don't take anything that he says about me as a, an attack on me. It's fun. It's just, it's, it's, it's shop talk. It's literally, you're talking shit. It's like anything else. If you're on a football field, you know, the other player is going to talk shit. Hey bitch, you know, get up. I didn't hit you that hard. It's, it's just like that. I don't, I don't need any of you to defend me against these people. Okay. I have no problems, none whatsoever with it, but I want to see this guy do better and he has enough, he has enough. Cause I see an AOL America online version of me. Okay, the way he acts, the way he talks, and the way he brags and shit, and doesn't really have the skill set yet to be like that. That's exactly what I was doing on America Online. I talked like I had it then. I have it now. You see it. I have it. But back then on America Online, I talked like I had it and I didn't. So I, I see an opportunity for me to say, hey, look. The ICG Junior. Because that's his attitude. That's how I behaved on America Online. If you listen to me, like I'm literally talking to my 20 year old self in him. And a lot of you don't understand it, but it's a project for me. It's like a piece of meat between my teeth and my tongue keeps going back to it. I want to fix him. And he's being stubborn because he doesn't want people saying You listen to ICT and he's your instructor, he's your mentor. You don't need to ever call me a mentor. Just listen to good advice, that's all. And watch how it changes you. For the better, stop trying to trade once you get a win. Stop. Okay? I said this in my post to you that may or may not make it to your comment section. Stop trying to trade with the maximum size. Stop trying to cater to your students or viewers because you still have time in a day. If you get out of a trade and you made money, you made 2, 000, whatever you made, stop, turn the charts off, go get on your boat and enjoy the rest of the day. Who in their right fucking mind would say Dude, that's failure. You're going out there making a couple thousand dollars and then going out and living your life and doing what you want to do and you weren't even out here for an hour. See, you're, you're trying to cater, you're trying to cater to people that are most likely not going to do shit with whatever you're doing. They're not going to pay you for your service. They're in there listening, and most of them are there to listen to you hopefully get it wrong. That's really what's going on. That's what social media is. Social media is really a bunch of cannibalizing zombies that just want to see other people fall so they can laugh about it. That's all it is. So, why cater to the majority that's like that when you could answer the itch that everybody else that likes you wants? They want to see you share a positive experience, talk about where you think the market's gonna go, and then when you execute on it and you show that I did this with my trade, I made money, now I'm done. I know I have the tendency to self destruct if I stay here. I know I have the tendency To go in and do another trade when it's not obligated to you. I'm not obligated to show you trades. I'm not obligated to show you another winning trade. I'm not obligated to do the afternoon session when I made money in the morning. See, that's control of yourself. That's managing yourself and it's managing your audience, but you are allowing your audience to manage you. If I had every request that's ever given of me. I would constantly be out here performing tricks all the time doing shit all the time. I don't need to do that I'm in control of my audience. I dictate the pace. I dictate every aspect of whatever the fuck I'm gonna do I do that which gives me ultimately control of me as the trader. Now a 20 year old ICT on AmeriCorps Online Anybody to ask me to do anything. I was like a Dancing bear in a carnival or a circus like whatever was asked of me. I was trying to do it And I was never able to satisfy everyone. And which was a problem for me because I was trying to satisfy everyone. You are not going to satisfy anyone or everyone rather. And if people talk shit about you, who gives a shit if they talk shit about you? Look at, look at where you are. Look at what you've accomplished. You have progress. Even though you're saying you have a low period right now, and this is the worst your trading has been for the year. Guess what? You're acknowledging it. You're talking about pumping the brakes. That's exactly what you should do. Exactly what you should do. If you would have said, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to push even harder, cause I'm going to get out of this. That would have been the worst fucking thing to say. That's what I was afraid you were going to say, but I was listening to you. And I'm like, good. That's the right mindset. Dial it back, cut short your frequency of trading and take some time off. It's the holidays folks. It is the holidays. You want to make your holidays suck. Try to make money, lose it, and then wake up Christmas morning. You might see your children smile and be bright. Oh, I'm opening presents and gifts. It's such a joyful time to be together having meals and being with your family But you remember you blew your fucking account yesterday on Friday before whatever it's gonna It's gonna put a big damper on all your holiday spirit And you'll be faking it in the presence of your family members because you're tore up because you lost something that could easily be fixed When you restart it again, whatever amount of money you've lost ever All of that is easily recouped with interest if you know what you're doing. But in your mind, you think that I blew my account. I spent this much money on funded account challenges. I blew this much money, putting it in real accounts. I've done this. I've done that. I've done this. I've done that. All of it, add it all up. There's no money that you've spent. That can't be made in the future. See, you've allowed those things to beat you down and make you second guess that anybody can be profitable, that you can't be profitable. And you think that you have failed enough times to solidify it in your mind. That you're a failure. So therefore I shouldn't even try, but you just want to listen to other people because you can't let go of it. That means you're a trader folks. That means you're a trader. It just means you didn't listen to good advice. You didn't practice like you should have. You didn't study like you should have. You didn't journal and you didn't give yourself a real chance. You rushed into it. Just like I did when I first started, I've rushed into it. After four fucking weeks of just reading a book, I thought I knew how to trade and I went out there and I lost 50 percent of my money overnight. The first trade, that's who's talking to you. The same guy that you watched literally light it all up this week. In a condition, in a market environment that I don't generally trade in. And I'm doing it with a demo because I'm teaching. Period. I'm not licensed to give you trade advice. I'm not going to open myself up to liability. And I don't give a shit how many times people talk about it in the comment section. Oh, it's demo. Okay, you do it in demo. You're going to watch me do it in a real Robins Cup next year. What are you going to say then? Stupid thoughts. So hopefully you guys have done some personal inventory with this discussion this morning. I talked a little bit longer than I was supposed to, but that's usually what happens around here. Isn't it over delivered, but, uh, I'm not going to charge you anything more, but the pitfalls and plagues. that I covered here. I really want you to think about them because I see a lot of it happening on social media. A lot of it happening now on Twitter. They're all rushing in to try to fill a void and there's going to be a whole new supply of people that are going to be wanting to chase whatever lead dog barks loudest. And I'm not saying that anybody that doesn't come up That they shouldn't be listened to. I'm just saying, think, think, are you really seeing everything? Do you know these people? Do you know that they can trade? Do you know that they have something that works? Do you have, um, do you have the funds to pay them for what they're going to ask you to pay them for? Cause really there's that, that is a big thing right now. And. The new movement is starting funding companies. I am not associated with any funded account company. I would never be associated with any funded account company. Um, but it's equivalent to running a brokerage firm that's fake. Where, when you have clients that deposit real money and when they lose, and they've only been really given a demo account, really, um, that I'm operating on the guys that would demo when they lose money, the person that set up that shell company, they're just taking that person's losses. That's how they're affording their land or Ferraris and bullshit, because they're not making money trading. But there's a big window of opportunity for that type of business. And there's millions available to that. I would never. Ever set foot in that type of thing. I would never be associated with any of that and just look around and you're going to see a whole lot more of that type of stuff. I'm not saying every person that, or. Individuals that do it are shady or that they're not, you know, trying to do what's right. I'm just saying, just be careful because that's the biggest thing right now. I see the trends shifting to, well, I really don't have to trade because now if I start a funded company, the chances of someone being successful in trading is, is very limited. And while you may get. The individual outlier come out once in a while that does real well to have to be paid out. Um, the majority of individuals that come in and they're paying for challenges and they're failing and failing that revenue and it's constantly coming in. Um, that will offset the few people that will ever join that company to get paid out. And the flavor is also, you know, if there's someone extremely wildly profitable, This was one of my concerns. You know, do I have students that eventually get banned because they're just beating them up? And I don't know, I haven't had anybody come forward and say, yeah, ICT, this is what this, and that's my interest though. Like I'm interested to see, cause there's a lot of you that listen to me. A lot of you trade with my concepts and a lot of you do well. Would there ever be a situation where there's so many people coming in? Like that was that, like I said, like the question I would ask if I was. Sitting down with all of the prop firm owners, say like what happens when there's a lot of winners and your model really is based on the income stream that comes in by way of the challenges being paid, paid for in that revenue that comes in, they use that as their operating. And I might be wrong, but my understanding is that's what they do. But even if you have a really good, like, say I went in there and I did a A prop firm challenge. And then they gave me a funded account and I ran that up to millions of dollars. That still wouldn't be enough to pay out on just, I mean, that's my opinion. I don't know. I've very limited understanding about it, but I see a meal ticket that could be easily tapped into. And just sit back and watch over the next six to 12 months, how many new prop firms creep up by social media traders. That's all I'm saying. Okay, because it's another way of fleecing individuals because if you put money in into it Okay, and you're pouring money into challenges and challenges and challenges like when you have a fake brokerage firm and they pay they put money Into it if you lose naturally you thought you lost the money, but in reality that money was never placed in the marketplace It was just worked with the premise of it like a demo account. If you win, okay, chances of you asking for a withdrawal is next to nil because everybody wants to run it up big. So when you lose, you think, well, I lost it. So that person that runs that fake brokerage account, they're just taking that money and depositing it in their bank account and paying for their Ferraris and paying for their bullshit Rolex. Okay. All that's garbage. That's trash. Okay. I would feel like a piece of shit if I ever did anything like that. I would never even think to do things like that, but I'm not saying all prop firms are like that. And I'm not saying all brokerage firms are like that, but there there's, there's a level of shadiness that certain individuals on social media, that they they're putting their hands in everything. And when they won't come out of their MT4, that's a problem. Cause if you know how to trade and you're making money and you're a millionaire, okay. You'll be able to do that in another brokerage account. You know, I've shown profitability and taking trades with AMP global futures. That's a real regulated broker in the United States. I traded with thinkorswim. I literally have it on this YouTube channel and you can see me log into the account and I doubled the account in like five weeks using one contract. So that's not even trying. That was me answering a lot of questions from students. What would you do if you got drawdown here and how would you fix this? I literally put the account in drawdown and showed me coming out of it too. I went into 30 percent drawdown in one day and came right back out of it in the same day. Like, these are all questions that students that paid me where I am obligated. To answer their questions. I'm not obligated to answer everybody that makes comments, questions. And I personally, I can't answer every single question that gets made to me. I have so many videos and there's always new comments being left on them. And also people email me that I can't get to because the email queue is so long. I can't, I can't cater to everybody. And I know sometimes that it makes you feel like I'm ignoring you or you don't matter enough. Even some of my paid students feel this way because there's so many of you now. So it's one thing I wish I could do. I wish I could be more accessible, I guess, the way it was when I was on baby pips, where anybody that would ever ask me anything, it was right then and there when we were on baby pips, I would go into the chat room and we would shut it down. Basically the chat window or chat room would stop working. There were so many people that would come in because I wanted to answer questions. I wanted to have an interaction. I want you to, I want you to learn, but now because the audience size being what it is, it's impractical. For any of you to expect me to have a one on one type response into the guy that sent me, um, please let me be trained by you. I'll pay you 5, 000. I'm not, I'm not looking to get paid and I'm not doing one on ones. So my time is being given to you charitably because I want you to do well. There's no, there's no currency exchange there. The way you pay me back is listen, follow the instructions, get your success, and then tell me what you did. That's all. That's all is. It's all I want. Okay. And if you use my concepts, you just give me a nod. So that way everybody knows that it's a gift from God. Now I'm not saying I'm God. I'm saying, but it's. That's where it all came from. I want him to receive all the glory, not me. I want him. And when I talk to you like I do today, it's intended for you to understand that you will feel like you're the exception that all these things are happening to you. That's holding you back. Everybody went through it. And you're going to feel impulsive about making decisions to try to do what's unnecessary. If you made 500 a day, is that failure? Because I'm going to tell you, it's not. If you made a hundred dollars a day, is that failure? It's not. But in your mind, you think it's not success. You got to make a lot of money. No, you don't. Who said that? You did. Nobody came to you and said, unless you make this much money, you aren't successful. And if anybody ever said that, that's somebody you don't listen to. Just disconnect from them because it's impractical, unrealistic for you to walk out there your very first time at bat, thinking that you're going to start taking down these massive halls, these big windfall victories, which I have no, I have no respect for those. I don't give a shit how much money you withdraw on your first time. Can you do that the following month and the following month and the following month and the following month? Because chances are it's not going to happen like that. So like I said to Patrick in the comment, I said, whenever you talk about your biggest win, you need to take that out and throw it away. Your biggest losing trade, take that out also. What are you left with? Because that's your real stats. That's your real meat on the bone in the middle. That's what matters most. Your best, best, best trade is always going to be the one that you over leveraged and you were swinging for the fences and it was a gamble. So you can't even attribute that as your skill. That's just, that was a lottery win. And the losing maximum loss day is the same thing you held for that same expectation, but it went against you. You weren't trading with your model. Your biggest maximum loss. That's not you trading responsibly. So on both, in both extremes, you need to take those away. And I learned that from Larry Williams. So when you're looking at systems and numbers, take your best number out. But he didn't say take the worst one out. He always said take the best one out. I say both because that's illustrating a lack of you not following your model. And what's left is the clearest depiction of you when you are engaging your model. within the realm of your ability to stick within it. That's the results in the data you have to show it. If that means that your average profitability on per trade is less than a thousand dollars, then that's what it is. That's not shameful because if you're consistently doing that, as your equity grows, you let money management do the heavy lifting when it's appropriate to add to it. And like I told Matt. Trades by Matt. I told Patrick, we own the same thing. I tell my students the same thing. You let your equity dictate how and when you add more contracts. When you've watched me run up accounts in MT4 and watch me run them up in TradingView and you watch me run them up in the Thinkorswim and you watched me run them up in AMP. Those principles are what I was employing. Not to those parameters, but I was allowing when I made money that afforded me to trade with more contracts. When I lost money, then I traded with less margin, less contracts until I made 50 percent of that loss back. Then I would bump right back up to whatever the leverage was that I made prior to taking the losing trade. Now, if I'm in a trade intraday, And I take a loss and it may be less than what I'm allowing for, for the trade. So in other words, let's just say I'm risking three and a half percent. I'm not saying that you should trade with three and a half percent risk, but let's say that's what it was. I get stopped out in the loss equates to 1. 7%, 1. 9%. I'll put the same amount of leverage back on because I didn't take a full three and a half percent loss. So that's my marker that says, okay, if it gets below that, then I have to make a cut in the leverage. So I may take a smaller loss. That is less than what I would take as a full risk for that day. If I hit that threshold, then if I take another trade, it has to be with less margin. See, some of you don't look like, look at trading like that. You're like, okay, I can still afford to trade 15 contracts. So I'm going to take the next trade with 15 contracts. You're assuring that you're going to fail. You're guaranteeing it. You're ushering it along. You're inviting it. You're laying it out there with a red carpet, blow my account out. You're not trading with enough movement afforded to you. By trading with that large leverage. So if you just traded with one contract, okay, one, just one contract, I made a hundred percent plus percent in five weeks trading with thinkorswim doing one contract trading on NASDAQ, go look at it. It's on there real money. And I set that up as a realistic expectation for you. I think that that's realistic. For a new student first year, I think that's realistic, not make a hundred percent in one month, but for the sake of, if you were picking, choosing one trade per week, you take those examples in mind, you know, you can make a hundred percent in a year and some of you are like, well, that's not enough. Where are you going to be in 10 years from now? Will you have a million dollars working your job? You won't. But if you start with a thousand dollars. And after taxes, you net a hundred percent return. You got over a million dollars in 10 years. And that's a very, very slow paced snails crawl approach to fortifying 10 years, you have a million dollars. Now, a million dollars isn't shit anymore today, but that's just an example that I started with when I was on BabyPips. I was saying, look, you guys look at money differently than I do. I look at how I can take a little bit and make a lot over time. Over time. So, when you sit down and you say to yourself, I'm going to learn how to trade. I'm going to be successful at this. Okay, you all have a timeline that you're going to be Profitable buy. That's a mistake. That's a mistake. You're tying, you're trying to time your success. You're trying to time it like it's the graduation when you go to college. Well, if I go through the curriculum and I show up every year, I do all your semesters, spring, summer, fall, winter, then I would have all my credits by this time. And then I'll graduate this year. That's not how trading works. I know that's what you want it to be like, but it's not. Some of you go in and you subscribe to the idea. It might take you a year and a half to get there. And you get into content like I have and listen to the good logic, like this discussion today, where it helps you calibrate your mindset and filter all the bullshit. Acknowledge the things that you're feeling is real. It's, you're not the exception, but there's a way of going through it properly and staying on course. Don't let short term adversities deviate your course of action. And then you make the learning curve longer than it needs to be, because that's what really happens. I made it longer for myself because I was trying to tinker with something that was working and I kept trying to make it better when it was already the best it can be. I mean, look at my entries, the strategies I use for entering a trade. Like I'm literally buying lows. I'm buying the middle of fair value gaps. That's the low points. How can anybody argue against that? There was a comment that was left by a guy. He said, Oh, come on, man. Let's make it believable. Like you're every day being perfect with this. Thank you. Thank you for the comment. I mean, apparently you didn't notice me getting stopped out a few times, but I take that as a compliment, but that's not what he meant to that. When your results are so good, other people can't acknowledge it or believe that they're, they're, they're even real. That's the highest form of compliment. I don't look at that and think, Oh, he thinks I'm a fraud. He might think that I'd see him seeing my results in my executions that are absolutely real saying it's too good to be true. That is the greatest compliment anybody could give to a trader. If your results look too good to be true, then yet you keep proving it. That's delicious. But it wasn't like that when I first started, it was a fucking train wreck and the train just kept backing up and rolling back over top me, backing, rolling back over top me. And I felt like it was never going to end. And I didn't have what I'm trying to provide for you as a source of encouragement. Keep sticking to it. Okay. Just keep sticking to it. You don't need to come back to my YouTube channel. You don't need to contribute to the ad revenue fund. Okay. You don't need to do that. You already have the videos downloaded. You know, you do just study them, stick to it. Don't fall away. And think that it's not for you because it is for you, but you're just trying to do things that are not conducive for you to get the results because you cannot time your schedule. You can't schedule and time your success. It's going to arrive right on time. It's going to make perfect sense why it arrived when it does. And you're going to see how you, not me, not anyone else, not other things and other factors hindered you. You did. And it'll make perfect sense what you did that prolonged everything. Every single one of my profitable students had the same epiphany that happens. They made it harder themselves. Usually it's the conversations like this that triggers them and says, you know what? I am doing those types of things. Let me try not doing those things and just listen. And all of a sudden the curtain parts and they see the show for what it really is. They can see where the market's going to go and they can see their model is in fact, they're all the time. And then they build the confidence of going in and engaging with it. And when they get the result of being in it and getting out and with a profitable move, they don't go back in because they didn't feel good enough. That that wasn't a good enough move. I didn't make enough money. I could have made more. So what you could have made even more money if you would have bought and sold every high and low on the hourly chart from Sunday's opening to Friday's close, how much money did you leave on the table? Folks, you're always leaving money on the table. It's not realistic to think that way, but yet, it's being posed as an argument in the comment sections of my videos, other people, from people that are working at fucking Jiffy Lube on Monday. They're probably working right now listening to this, hating my guts because I've mentioned the fact that they're doing grease monkey jobs and they ain't trading, they can't trade. But they're very opinionated in other people's stuff. You're a clown. You're a source of humor for people that know how to do it. But for some of you that are very, very impressionable, you let the impressions of other people make a huge alteration to the course of action that you're trying to start with in this industry, when 90 percent of this war in trading is in your head. It's a psychological battle. You're battling it with yourself. And then once you get into the marketplace, then you're, you're wrestling the market. And that's hard. It's real hard. If you don't know what you're doing and you're brand new, you have no experience and you've never been here before every little tiny fluctuation, one tick against your entry. Feels like the beginning of a run on your stop. And that's not what it's like when you're thinking like I'm teaching you. I trust my model. If it goes to my stop, I placed my stop incorrectly and I'm okay with that. I know the likelihood of my next trade is going to be just as well as the one I just entered. It's not diminishing. The efficacy of my models are not diminishing. They're constant. Your appreciation for those models and approaches are on the upslope. You're at the beginning of your journey and I envy all of you. I envy all of you. I miss those moments of astonishment where I would see something and I'm like, okay, this is what it should do. And let's see what happens. And it delivers perfectly to the tick. And then you're looking around the room like, am I supposed to know this? Like you're expecting the black suits to show up in front of your house. Helicopters landing in your backyard. Like you're coming with us, you know, those moments of astonishment are amazing, those epiphanies, those, those moments where the veil is lifted and you see the market as it really is in binary form, you know, and Neo finally understands who he is and where he's at. He doesn't see the people in front of him throwing punches. It's this. Zeros and ones. And all he has to do is, this is what his response is going to be. And he knows what they're going to do before they do it. That's a macro. That's a macro. Manual intervention. When you see the black cat glitch and it's, it's deja vu. Okay. There's so many similarities and analogies that could be made with that movie because we do live in a simulation. Everything that's around us is pre, pre programmed and, and, and scripted. And I could go a long direction off course with this and probably get myself in trouble on YouTube, but we're going to leave that for another day in another medium. But, uh, the idea is in closing, you need to guard your mind. You need to do the very least in the beginning. Because if you can't get experience or growth or progress measured in any capacity with the least amount of exposure to risk, It matters not how much more risk you can accumulate. What's the difference is, is if you have 15 contracts on or if you have one micro lot on, if you're wrong about what you're trying to do in the marketplace, the market's going to show you. Do you need the maximum pain, the mass, the maximum expense, the maximum discomfort for you to appreciate that you're not following the model correctly? Because some of you, you're full of shit when you say, I got to learn how to trade with real money. That's the only way I can learn how to trade. No, no, what you're doing is you're saying that I'm a fucking idiot. Please beat me over the head with a stupid stick because I don't know enough to know that I can do this without any harm to myself, without any financial risk, without any kind of hardships, that's going to cause me to second guess my own ability because of the fear of being wrong associated with money. That's the reality. Books aren't going to teach you that way. Mentors aren't going to teach you that way. It's sugar free, as it should be. You want it to taste sweet, like honey. And sugar is a disease causer. The more you can cut sugar out of your diet, the best you're going to have in terms of health. The same way with trading. You want meat and potatoes, baby. Meat and fucking potatoes. That's it. Because whatever you can do With the least, if you have a measurable outcome that is more times than not delivered to you based on a model that you're working with, when you do that same procedure over and over again, just like a cookie cutter, you take it and you press it into the dough. Are you expecting a star shaped cookie dough cutter to give you a shape of a circle or a square? No, it's designed to do one thing. You press it into the dough, you lift it up, there you have a piece of dough that's cut out in the form of a star. Wonderful. Are you trying to do something else outside of that? No! Your job is to find another place where you can find the dough, which is a trade setup, and you're going to press your cookie cutter, which is your mold or your model rather, press it into that dough and pull it out. And you take home that star shaped or whatever the shape of that cookie cutter is, whatever your model is, if it's the optimal trade entry, if it's the silver bullet, if it's, you know, anything else, that's all you're there to do. And demanding it does anything more than that. Is foolishness. The results that you get from the least amount of leverage from that is irrelevant in the beginning, because you have to get to the point where you can replicate that over and over and over again, more times than not over the course of a month, over the course of a week. And taking that sample set and saying, okay, I have done this for a week, and this is the many transactions I've taken. This is how many that were profitable. This is how many times that were not profitable. This is how much. I was able to yield as a net return over time. It'll become easier to do it. That's the goal. And you want it to be boring. You know, you know, on Wednesday morning of next week, you're going to go out there and you're going to find 10 handles in S& P. You know, you're going to find 30 handles in a NASDAQ. I know that. I absolutely fucking know I'm going to do that. I know I'm going to be able to do that. I can do that. I know tonight when I lay my head down that my thought is not going to be swirling around. Am I going to be able to trade next week? Am I going to be able to pull anything off? Am I going to be able to find a setup? It's a given. It's absolutely given. I'm not worried about that. That is confidence that you cannot appreciate until you have it. And most traders don't have it. Even if they are profitable, they're, they, they still say to the markets, random, it is random. If you're believing the bullshit, you're trying to trade off of all these things that you're subscribing to as a religion, Elliot wave, Wyckoff, it's this, it's jumping the Creek, it's this, uh, you know, this wave count, man, if I had a trade like that, I would not be able to sleep at night. That's too many variables, too many variables where I'm trading on constants. I know where the liquidity is. I know where the inefficiencies are. I know what the economic counter is going to produce a injection of volatility at a specific date and time. I'm not, I'm not clueless. I'm not confused. I know exactly when I'm going to step my ass in there and tap dance all over this shit and moonwalk my ass out the door with a bounty. I'm going to do that anytime I fucking want. And when you learn how to do it, you'll do the same thing. It's confidence that you cannot appreciate until you have it. In the hands of weaker men, and ladies, you'll be a prick like I was on America Online when I finally got it. I was an asshole. You think I'm an asshole now. No, I was bragging. I was really bragging. All the time. I'm just spitting facts right now, and I'm bringing receipts every single day. But you don't want to accept it, because you can't do it yet, and you think it should have happened to you because you watched a few videos. Or you scribble some bullshit on a, on a notepad or a napkin at work. And you think that you've been journaling. That's not, that's not a real attempt at doing it. You're half assing it. And if you're half assing it, don't be surprised when you get half assed results. When you make it your business, that this is your career, you are learning how to operate and run a business. What is it you incorporated you incorporated because trading opens up so many more opportunities than just getting funded, getting paid out, getting an account with real money in it and then taking withdrawals from it. If that's all you see in trading, wow, what a myopic view. You have so many ways to turn this into a enterprise. Like I could look at the, look at the level I am right now. Okay. No advertising, all word of mouth. And I'm not even selling anything anymore. Any one of you right now would love to be where I'm at and you would be pushing it, maximizing it, squeezing every drop out of the, the, the level of attention that's on me right now. Imagine if you had that with real skill. All I'm trying to do is inspire you to do that. Just do that and apply it to everything you do in life. You'll never run out of money. You'll never feel any kind of anxiety. You'll never have second doubts about what you're going to be able to accomplish. You won't see any ceiling at all. No ceiling. Anytime I want to walk out at any given time and start making millions of dollars, I can do it. And I don't need to be trading on the market to do it either. I can make millions in the trading market. I can make money in millions of dollars marketing myself as an educator. I can go out and write books. I can go out and make courses. I can do signal services. I can go around and do teaching circuits. I can be hired on by companies that are asking me every fucking week, please train our analysts. No. Who's in a seat of control here? I am. When you're comfortable with what you have and you don't need any more, that's a feeling none of you can understand. I don't ever need to trade. I don't ever need to make any more money doing anything. I'm completely comfortable. My family is set. That's what you want to be able to do for your family. You want to be able to lock it down, set it up where it's residual wealth, legacy wealth, but I hold my children to a higher degree of responsibility while they could easily just have money thrown in their hands. And I've done this and they've recklessly spent it. They've done stupid shit with it, put it in fucking cryptocurrency and whatnot, and lost it with shady ass brokers, their wallet, something didn't happen, they can't get their money. Some other crypto went to zilch zero, eh, you know, shit happens. But I make them work. I want them to know what it feels like because if I just give them money and they've never tasted what it's like for everyone else to, like it was for me, I had to work and part time jobs on top of it. When I was replenishing the money I blew in those accounts, I had to work a secondary job to get it. And it took a lot to be able to get that money back in there just to do it again. But I didn't lose hope. I was cussing and ranting and raving the whole time I had to do it, wanting to quit the extra job I was working. But I knew, unless I did this, nothing's going to change. Nothing is going to change. Unless you put your feet to the ground and say I'm digging my heels in I know it's gonna be hard I know I'm gonna have pushback I know it's gonna be Requiring me to put time into it when all my friends are out there running around and clubbing and doing this and chasing tail and doing This and doing that and drinking having fun on the weekends notice. I'm gonna be in these charts studying I'm gonna be living my life differently, but they're still gonna be out there trying to chase tail broke as fuck driving a beater fucking car And ain't doing shit in their life And you'll be able to pull down annual fucking salaries on a week. You can't even imagine where you're going to be. You can't even imagine it. Whatever you think. Whatever you think is your level of success. It's not big enough. It's not big enough. You have no idea when you strip all these limitations that you put on yourself, you shackle yourself with your own mindset. You do it. This is all I can see myself doing right now. When you start making a hundred thousand dollars a year, you start thinking to yourself, Oh shit, that wasn't all that hard. I thought it was really hard. Well, now I'm going to aim for 500, 000 and the attempts that you do to do that, you get there in less than half time. And you start thinking, well, shit. They say the first million dollars is the hardest one. I'm about there. Boom. In a couple of months, then you're there and you look back and say a million dollars, isn't all that much money. And yeah, it took some effort, but it didn't take as much as I thought it was going to take. And then you start making 5 million, 10 million, 15 million, 50 million. And I know I'm talking in numbers. None of you can fucking comprehend, but it is what it is, folks. It's just math. It's just math. You're compounding the efforts of what you're able to do on the smallest form and that little cookie cutter mold that I'm going to find five handles in the S& P to begin with, and I'm going to let it grow to, I can start doing eat and in 10 or start with 20 in NASDAQ and work towards 30 and 40 to 50, you only got to do them a few times a week, folks. And as your equity increases, you can afford to do more contracts that compounds and you keep adding it more and more and more. But the level of risk is always the same. Whatever you associate in terms of your risk. I'm not going to risk more than 1%, but I can't get rich trading with 1%. Bullshit. You can get rich trading with one quarter of 1%. You have to submit the time. None of you want to do that part, but that's the part you have to submit to. That's the first thing I submitted to when I first started trading. I had a 20 year plan. Imagine me writing a book. How to be successful and retire 20 years as a trader. Nobody's buying that book. Now, in the 80s and the 90s, that would have been a great title because everything was around, what? For you younger folks, you ain't gonna know this, but it was all mutual funds. It was when mutual funds and infidel, uh, not infidel, infidelity. Everybody was trying to get people to invest in these mutual funds. And they were projecting, this is what you should do. Average is 12 percent return on stocks over the course of the years. You put this much money in, your money can compound. You'll have a million dollars by the time you're whatever. So I was like, well, shit, if I can make 12 percent in a mutual fund a year, what happens if I start making 12 percent a month? And then what happens when I start making 12 percent every two weeks? And then what happens if I make 12 percent a week? And what happens if I can compound my efforts and find trades that yield 12%? In the same day, suddenly all these big numbers that were fearful for me as even contemplating as realistic ever to reach for, they became reachable. Because I'm not increasing the level of effort. In my trades, all I need is the setup. And as the equity increases in the baseline, it was whatever it is at the time, it's a hundred thousand, 000 million dollar account, whatever that is, the risk percentage is never increasing. So whatever you've adopted as your model is, this is what I'm going to risk. It's going to be 1 percent or less. It's going to be a half percent. It's going to be one quarter percent. You're trying to tell me you're not satisfied risking one quarter of 1 percent of a million dollars. If you have that in your trading, okay, it's real money, not funded bullshit. It's real money and you're able to take down a setup that yields five to eight to 10 times. What you're risking. Really? You don't, you don't think that that's a good living? 50 fucking grand a week. You can't get rich. You're fucking great. That's rich. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You failed math, but you have to give yourself time. You got to let it build up. And as you grow and you put more things in the operation where you're running a business, And you start milking social media. And then if you put your presence online where you can monetize that as well, then you get the best tax treatment there is. You can drive all these big fancy cars and lease them and laugh at people and say, Oh, yo, it's a lease. Yeah, I'm getting paid to drive it, fucker. Enjoy riding around in your beater ass fucking pickup truck that's 15 years old. Dusty ass shit with McDonald's french fries that ain't even fucking decomposed yet. Sitting back here talking about something. You know, you drive around in a leased car, bitch. Get out of here. My cars cost more than your fucking house. Get the fuck out of here with your bullshit. These people will try to tear you down all the time. And the more success you have, the more success that you share, there are more of them going to come at you. Are you going to live your life worrying about what they're going to say about you? Fuck these people. They are losers. The fact that they're spending their time talking about you, they're fucking showing you they're losers. Nobody that has success spends any time talking about somebody else. Nobody does. Nobody has time talking about that shit. You keep your business minded by you. You mind your own business. Nobody else is going to mind it. You do it and you stay out of everybody else's business. You keep your head in the charts. You keep building, understanding yourself, where you make mistakes. Where do you fear? What do you get anxious about? What do you get too, um, overzealous about prematurely or overconfident because there's a real thing like that. Identify those things. They're going to help you prune that tree, that money tree that you, you're growing into a money tree. I'm a, I'm a money making dynamo. I can walk out these fucking doors. I could lose everything. I could literally lose every fucking thing and I could start with zero money in my fucking pocket and in 12 months be a multi millionaire again. Do you feel that confident about yourself? Because everything I talked about in this presentation today, it all leans on having one skill set. I could be bred, I could be broke as fuck. And I can sit down with people and say, look, let's come together. I'm going to prove to you that I can do this. Okay. I'm going to prove to you that this can be made with real money. I don't have the money to give to you right now to contribute, but I have the skillset. Okay. I'm going to pull back the veil and tell you what I was doing in my younger years. When I got a married woman pregnant, I had to do this very thing. I had to be under the radar. I had friends that knew, friends and family that had money. That's how it worked. So because I couldn't sit down and put money in a brokerage firm because this woman was trying to get my back pocket all the time. So I worked menial jobs. I did those things to keep a gold digger from my pocket, my back pocket. I did that. I promised her when we went to court, I said, you won't see a fucking penny. And I had joint custody. So for the people that are saying I was a deadbeat dad, I had him every day of the week, except for one night, Thursday. When you broadcast you have lots of money you invite that kind of shit and some of you young men Literally are asking for the biggest fucking shock of your life. My cousin owns a business. He does real well He wants to talk to you. Okay, show me what it's gonna do on this All right, this this this this this damn do it again tomorrow. All right, it's gonna do this this this this this this How could I'm how much money I made there 20 grand what? Yep. What's the split? I get 15% And help anytime I need it. And that's what I was doing. That's exactly what the fuck I was doing. And I had everything I ever wanted. I had money all the time. I had so many friends and resources and more people constantly coming up. And I was scratching their back. They were scratching mine. They were giving me gifts. So when people talk shit about you and tear you down and think that they're winning and you laugh at them because you beat every fucking obstacle that was placed in front of you, who's really laughing loudest? There's always going to be someone in your family, your friends, that's going to deny and say, you can't do this. They're going to tell you, don't, don't waste your time doing it. Don't try. Don't even bother trying. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. That's the enemy talking. That is something that's trying to steal your future legacy. That's literally being laid in front of you. If this is your first time you ever listened to me, it's being laid in front of you right now. And I guarantee you, if you make a mistake of talking about to somebody else. Friend or family, you're going to give you 15 fucking reasons why you shouldn't do it. And ain't them telling you that. It's the enemy. Steal, kill, destroy. That's what they do. And if you believe them, that's unfortunate because you can do this. You absolutely can do it. There's so many people now that's came forward and says, this is what I use. And this is what's working for me. And you believe what you want to believe, but I'm making money. And here's the proof. Here's the evidence of it. I promised you two years ago I was gonna bring the receipts, and here they are. Look how many people are out there saying, you know, this is it. I, I found my way. I don't fear losing my job. I don't fear another pandemic. I don't fear inflation. I don't give a shit what gas costs. I could care less what gasoline costs. I have eight cylinder engines. I'm not gonna size down. I will pay their small tax. I don't give a fuck. None of that bothers me. , none of that. Not none of that's a deterrent to how I'm gonna spend my money. That is a living experience that I want all of you to have. I want you to all look at things and say, you know what? I don't fear what things cost. I don't fear inflation because you'll always outpace it. When you're a student that goes through college and you have a college education, inflation is still a factor to you. Oh, well, you, you don't understand house prices are too high. I know. I paid over 2 million for this house. I paid too much money. Every house is inflated right now. You're not going to have a house because it's too expensive. You got to have a place to live, right? I don't give a shit because I know all the things I'm doing elsewhere are offsetting whatever I spent on this. I got a free RV basically for 300, 000. It takes me about six years or so, and it'll be depreciated. That's all being taken away from my taxable income. All my cars. Except for one family vehicle. I always had a car that was considered the family vehicle, but I've always had company cars. Every gasoline intake that I put in those, except for my family car is 100 percent right off. When I buy food at a restaurant. It used to be you had to talk about business, but they did away with that. Now, now it's not like that anymore, but 50 percent of whatever you spend in food, look how much food costs. If you go through a restaurant, say you go to, uh, go to a Ruth Chris. Okay. You have yourself a nice meal, nice crab cake, nice steak or whatever. You can't not spend at least 200 some dollars. Well, you're beat at a six of 200 plus the, the tap, uh, the tip if you want to give it. Some people don't like the tip, which I think is ignorant, but it is what it is. You're, you're beat out of that money. Whenever I spend money, half of whatever I spend is deducted from whatever my taxable income is. When I go on vacations, when I, when I buy things like my computer, all of peripherals that go for my computer, all write off. So when I buy stuff, I buy the highest end, everything. I want the maximum benefit of having the best. And I want the maximum write off. See, when you're an employee working for a company, you're looking for what you can afford. Because you're getting beat for what you spend. Because you're not financially literate. You've been indoctrinated. You've been told the American dream is go to work, get a good job, get an education, get a house, get tied up in a 30 year mortgage. Fuck 30 year mortgages. If you have a mortgage, you're an idiot. You're paying fucking two times, three times for a house. That's already too much money when it's just so much easier for you to rent something that you can afford, learn how to invest. Take that money, maximize it, build it up, and buy something fucking cash. Oh, it's easier said than done. I understand that. I, look, I hear you. I hear you. But I was there the same way. I lived in apartments. I lived in areas that I would not feel comfortable walking in. I did all that stuff. Nobody walks out. You know, well, let me, let me rephrase. There are people walking around with a silver spoon up their ass, but it wasn't me. My middle name is Joe, average fucking Joe. That's where I came from. Average Joe from middle river, Maryland. That is me. And if I can do this with all the hardships and mental illness and shit that I had to deal with, I know you can, I've already been here. I've. I blazed that trail. I know all the problems. I know where you're going to step and twist your ankle. Don't step there. All you have to do is listen to me. You don't want to listen to conversations like this. Oh, I got better things to do this Saturday. I ain't listening to this. This guy talks too much. He loves the way he talks. He loves his own voice. No, and I don't, I don't like my own voice actually. But the point is this, if someone that you knew had a big ass fucking house, 10, 000 square foot house, Millions of fucking dollars, makes money hand over fist, doesn't go to work, just does whatever the fuck they want to do, and they say, hey, let me help you out. Let me show you how to make some money. Would you tell that guy to go fuck himself? Get out of here, I ain't got time to listen to you. You'd be like, yeah, I'd love to hear what you have to say. See, the difference is you just look at a chart that says demo down on the left hand side, and that's a big impediment for some of you. You're a victim to social media. You're a victim to indoctrination. See, I can't come out here and promise you getting rich. I can't, I won't, but for the people that are astute, that they can see, they can read between the lines, okay, he's not promising that I'm going to get rich. He's just promising that I'm going to be able to tell where this market is going to go before it does it. More times than not. Okay, so now what happens when I monetize that transaction? Oh shit, and if I can repeat it, oh my goodness. I didn't say it. This is something you came up with. You came to that decision to start putting money behind it. And the question really is, is who wouldn't? If you get really good at something, if you knew the winning lottery numbers three days out of a week, wouldn't you fucking play the lottery? Wouldn't you deliver pizza to get some extra money to buy more tickets? You would start doing all kinds of shit, right? And that's why I entice all of you to simply go in and study what I've shared. If it's there, you'll see it. And then you'll start doing the math and say, well, if I do this and this, and then all of a sudden the trader bug has bit you, you're infected for life. And then once you see it working, you can't unsee it. Everything else you listen to other people talk about while the market's going up and down, it's laughable, it's comedy. And that's what makes us, in the eyes of other people's discipline, that we're toxic. No, we just, it is what it is. It's the same thing when you go to a football game. The other team, you know, the, what do you call it, the fans of the other team, they're in the stands with you. And they're talking shit just like, you know, you're gonna talk to them. Steelers versus the Ravens. You know, I couldn't tell you anything about football, okay? That's probably the extent of it. But I know that that rivalry, you know, the fans go at each other. It's the same thing with this. I don't have my heart broken over to, over this stuff though. When people say shit about me, I don't get upset about it. It's laughable to me. It's, it's funny. The same thing with these fans. Sometimes some fanatics go too far. And they want to throw fists or they want to do things and follow you back to your car and they want to follow you back to your house and they discover how much brass you have and they made the mistake. Okay. That's the problem when people go too far. And it's important that if you grow in this and you become some kind of a, uh, uh, a celebrity, which I don't want to be a celebrity, that the level of attention you're going to discover, some of you aren't, aren't going to be comfortable with it. So just know that you can become huge in this industry and become huge in terms of influence, be madly successful, but you're Just don't want to be weirdos and it just it's uncomfortable. It's weird. Um, they sit outside your house just to get pictures of you going through the mailbox. They want to see your wife. They want to see your kids. They want to see what you're driving. They want to see what your lawn looks like. They want to go through your trash cans. Like we literally wait for the trash guys to come in our neighborhood before we put our trash out because we have people in our trash cans. Think about that. It's love. That's next level kind of creepy shit, right? So. Just be careful what you ask for, because if you really want to be a big celebrity, and you want to have all kinds of attention, there's going to be people that want to get closer to you. And if you don't want to be best buddies with them, they become weirdos, okay? And they take offense to it, and they make up lies about you, and talk all kinds of bullshit. And no matter what you do, there's going to be other people out there that will believe anything Toxic said about you, even if it's not true. And that's just the state of the world. So there are all the pitfalls and the plagues that trading is going to present to you and how you navigate them is up to you. I've shared what I have gone through myself. I have given you some advice on how to think about it and how to navigate it. And the last bit of business cause I just forgot about it and just remembered it. Um, A lot of you are asking where my son Cameron is in his trading. And for some of you that don't know, I have, I have four boys and my 18 year old, um, he is the same one that was trying to get funded through and got funded with three accounts with, uh, Top Step. He made his way to their little leaderboard thing. He was up there two days in a row and whatnot. He had two payouts. And then failed to hold onto it, lost it, and then tried to get, uh, I don't remember, whatever their biggest, I think it's a hundred thousand account, whatever their biggest one is, he was trying to do that after he lost his funded account. And then he failed on that. So what he's going through is he had a girlfriend and some of you that are little dick energy guys, you're going to say, this is perfect excuses, blah, blah, blah, whatever. He should be perfectly because he's your son and he should be doing this. And I forced them to do this on their own. I give them advice. I tell them how to trade, but they still have to follow the rules. How many people get in the car accident by not simply following the rules to stay on your side of the fucking road, that line in the middle of the road is there to say, don't cross me. How many times do you cross it? How many times are you texting and your shit goes over that line? So don't give me the bullshit about because he's my son. It's still, he's being held to accountability. I'm not making it easy for any of them. So he had a girlfriend and she was going away to college this year. And I sat down with him on the summer and I said, I'm just letting you know, your chances of you surviving a boyfriend relationship and girlfriend type thing, um, is next to zero because you're going out of state, you're going to be gone for months. And Cameron is going to want to worry you to death texting and you missing you and whatever, cause he's a romantic at heart. Like his dad, right? So long story short, Uh, the inevitable happened. She said, you know, I, I can't stay with you in a, in a boyfriend relationship. So we can be friends. And she started dating another guy on campus. So that's done him in the terms of it broke his heart. He's, he's not, he's not the same anymore. Like he doesn't have any kind of drive. He's depressed all the time. Um, it's just, it's, it's sad, but I, I see myself because my first wife was the same way. Like she was my first in everything. And when she broke up. It was devastating. Like, I couldn't think about anything but her. It was just, it was a mess. It was a total mess. And he's going through that right now. So he doesn't want to do any trading. He doesn't want to do video games. He doesn't want to hang out with family. He doesn't want to do anything. He just goes to work, comes home tired and sore, and then hates his life, he said. So it's depression. That's the reality of the real world, folks. Okay. Trading doesn't remove it. Okay. Um, even if you make money. Those things are going to happen in your life. You're going to have a breakup. You're going to have a health problem. You're going to, you know, get into a car accident and things are going to get broken or destroyed, and you're going to have to pay money out of pocket. Things are going to blow up that, you know, cost you to replace. All those things are stressful. And he's a young man, he's 18 years old. This is his first adult thing and he's wrestling with it. So guys, ladies, you don't know this, but men really have it hard when a girl breaks up with them. Especially when you didn't see it coming and they were cute together. If they weren't having the separation of college, I think they would still be together, but you know, you spend months away from each other and then you are separated from your family too, in a new location, constantly stressed with school and somebody starts giving you attention, what are you going to do? You're going to pal out with them and it's natural. It's unfortunate, but it's still, it's natural. And he's wrestling with that. So, um, that's where he's at. He's not actively trying to do anything except for work his job and he's going through depression. So that's the reality of the real world folks. I mean, it is what it is. He has to snap out of that. He has to pull himself together and it took a while for me to do it when I was younger, but eventually I realized that it's one person that I wasn't meant to be with. It was nice while it lasted. I learned from it and I have better things to go and conquer and that'll happen for him too, but that's where he's at. And he's not in there trying to do anything else with, with top step. Um, he's not trying to do anything at all with trading. So we're giving him space. I'm not trying to push on him. And when he wants to talk to me about anything, you know, I'm available for it. But, uh, He'll get tired of working and they'll be like, okay, dad, can you help me? I already told him, I said, when you're ready to do it, we'll just sit down and we'll trade together. That's how we'll do it. And then you'll watch me do it. You'll copy what I'm doing. I'll explain why I'm doing it and he'll make money and he'll learn how to do it also. And then by the amount of money he makes, he will never put it down. That was like the last card I was going to use. I didn't want to do that part in the beginning. Because it creates codependency, but like, that's my insurance card with him. And I know that's what all of you want, but I'm not obligated to any of you. He's my son. He's going to succeed. He will be successful at it, but I got to let him go through these periods of uncomfortable where if I don't do this, this is what it's like. So that way, when he starts making money consistently in its annual salaries per month, he won't do anything to. Mess that up. Not a relationship. Not someone else that's a friend. Nothing. That's his business. It's his, it's his interest to keep it guarded. And he's not going to make stupid decisions because he's running an enterprise. But how do you teach an 18 year old that stuff? They got to go through some stuff. They got to feel discomfort. And for the people that's going to try to play father 101 for me, okay, and tell me I should do this, do that. You manage your own kids, okay? You manage your own kids and you do what you got to do in your life and your family. I'll do the way I want to do it. I'm not taking advice on how to raise my fucking kids, okay? But uh, they won't be homeless. Let's put it that way. And none of my kids live in fucking trailers. I'm just going to toss that in there because it's some stupid shit. None of my kids live in fucking trailers and they're not fucking, uh, going to be homeless. So, there you go. But anyway, Vinnie, uh, Vinnie E. Minnie, bring your bitch ass into Robins Cup. I'm absolutely gonna be in there, and I'm gonna throttle your fucking ass. Bring your shit, Mickey Mouse, cause I'm going to fucking cartoon your ass all the way through next year. Then the real fun starts. Until I talk to you next time, be safe.