You tell yourself you're a trader, but deep down you know something's off. The impulsive entries, the revenge trading, the blown accounts, they don't lie. So, here's the question very few traders are asking themselves. Are you actually trading or you just gambling with a different name? In this video, I am breaking down the science that separates the profitable few from the emotional majority. I started working with a trader, Ben, 3 months ago, and he came to me after 5 years of frustration, losing tens of thousands of dollars, blowing nearly every single account he traded, and he was stuck in a vicious cycle of making just enough progress to stay with trading, but not enough to actually see results. Now, over 30 minutes, I asked Ben a series of questions. I audited him, his trading, his decision-making, all that type of stuff. And we found that for 5 years, Ben was lying to himself. He thought he was a trader. He thought he had a profitable edge. But when we looked at the numbers and we looked at his processes and we looked at his trading plan and we looked at it honestly and objectively, it was obvious to see that Ben wasn't actually a trader. He was a gambler. He had a trading plan, but he didn't have a profitable edge. So Ben built five years of results, negative results, living in this delusion that he was actually trading and he was going somewhere. That's 5 years and tens of thousands of dollars gone in the drain. Do not let that be you. Now, the good news is it didn't take long for us to build a profitable system for Ben, rebuild his processes, his mechanical system, get the right mindset in place, and now Ben 3 months later already has $400,000 in funded accounts under his belt and is on track to consistently pulling payouts from these accounts. Now, before we get into this video, want you to comment below your biggest trading psychology challenge. I want to offer you some help. There's a huge debate going on whether trading success is psychology or it's strategy. Is trading success 90% psychology, 10% strategy? Is that 90% strategy, 10% psychology? The truth is both matter and they matter in different percentages depending on what part of the journey you are and what system you're trading and your risk tolerance and many many factors. But the truth is both strategy and psychology is crucial. Having a good trading strategy is like having the perfect workout plan constructed by the best personal trainer. You know exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. But then if you don't have a good psychology, you're not going to stick to the workout plan. You're going to binge eat. You're not going to show up for your training sessions. And the other key thing here is if you do follow through with your training schedule and you build that perfect physique, your psychology will determine whether you feel worthy to maintain that and hold on to that or to blow it all. So having a trading strategy is the crucial first step. Then once you have a proven edge, you then need to build the mindset and construct the mindset to be able to stick to that so you can pull consistent profits from the market by sticking to your trading plan. And then you need to be able to work on your mindset to be able to handle larger wins and losses when you scale up. And then you also need to work on your mindset, your belief systems, your self-worth to ensure that when you make money, you hold on to it and you grow it. So in this video, I'm going to show you the science behind having a profitable trading plan. Now, I'm going to give you the template to having a profitable trading plan in this video. And then in the preceding video, I'm going to give you the mindset you need pre and post execution to ensure you stick to it. So, if you're not already subscribe to this channel, make sure you do and you put your notification bells on so you don't miss that. Now, every profitable trading strategy has three things. You need to know when you're getting into the market and where. You need to know when you're exiting the market and where. And you need to know how much you're risking. And you need to have a risk management protocol in place. So for example, some traders will look on the daily and they will look for a daily direction prediction. Meaning that if there's a rejection at a key level and there's a bearish rejection in their mind, they've said, "Okay, my bias for today is to the downside. It's bearish." So they have a higher time frame bias. That's the first thing they look for. Then they go down to the lower time frames to look for an entry criteria. the one, two, three, four entry criteria that's needed to be able to put risk on in the market to know where your entry is and where your stop loss is going. So, you need to get clear on what your specific entries are. Typically, what I found through my journey is that you want to have some sort of a daily bias and then you want to drill down to lower time frames to pinpoint your entry. Now, secondly, you need to know once you put your entry in place, where are you putting your stop loss? If you're going short, are you putting it above a previous swing high? If you're going long, is it below a previous swing low? You need to get clear on where you're putting your initial stop-loss. Then, do you have a break even rule or do you take partials to cover risk? And then, how do you get out of the position? You can really get out of a position three ways. Stop loss, break even, or profit. Your initial stop-loss is what covers taking out for a loss. If you have a break even, rule, that's covering how you get out for a break even. And then finally, do you set take profits or do you actively manage your position to get out for profits? You want to get clear on each of those components. And then finally, how much are you risking per position? What's your risk rules? Typically, I recommend no more than 1% per trade. And then you want to figure out, okay, what's my max daily loss? And then what am I going to allow myself max daily? And then what's my draw down protocol? When I get closer to hitting my max draw down, let's say it's negative 10%. How do I scale down my risk to protect my psychology and to build a buffer so that I can protect my psych psychology and I can continue to stick to my trading plan? These are all questions you want to ask and answer and put into your mechanical trading plan. You want to get clear on the rules. You want to have checklists. You want to have simple rules. You want to have pictures. And you want to get clear on that. Now, there are really three rules when we talk about a profitable trading strategy. You need to be clear and you need to have it mechanical, meaning it's step by step. I see this, I do this. I see this, I do that. No discretion. The issue with discretion is that most traders think they're making wise discretionary decisions. But what they're doing is they're just going off on a greed trip thinking that they can get more than what the market's willing to provide for them. And they act based on impulse and greed and fantasies as opposed to true intuition. The only way to be able to tap into true intuition is to have the foundations in place first and then you allow intuition to do its thing. But what we're talking about right now is you need to make sure you have a clear mechanical trading plan. Meaning that you know exactly how you're entering. You know exactly how you're exiting. You know exactly what your risk management is. And there's no question in your mind. You want to get clear on that. You want to test that and you want to be certain in that. Now the next thing your trading plan needs to be is replicable because it's not about having one profitable trade. It's about consistently showing up to the market irrespective of wins or losses. You've stuck to your trading plan and that's what allows you to have consistent profitability over a long period of time. Because what you're going to do is you're going to approximate your edge. You may not win this individual trade. You may you may not lose this individual trade but over a large sample space you're going to approximate your edge which is maybe for example a 51% win rate at a 1:1 riskreward that is still profitable. Okay. But your trading plan needs to be mechanical and replicable for profitable execution. It also needs to be mechanical and replicable so that it's testable. You need to be able to go off and test your trading plan and run it through some sort of back testing or some sort of simulation, whatever it may be, to see that it's actually profitable in the first place. This is the issue that we had with Ben is that he built five years of trading losses on this illusion that he was trading a profitable system, but he wasn't actually profitable. He he wasn't trading an edge. He just built up this illusion in his mind. So, do not fall into that trap. Make sure your system is mechanical, replicable, and you're able to test it. And then finally, make sure your trading plan is profitable. And uh you know, this may seem obvious, but most traders don't actually go in there and do the due diligence to find that. They just take on someone's word and they just believe someone. Um don't don't do that. This is your life. This is your trading. This is your money. These are the years of your life that you're going to dedicate to it. Do not base this on someone else's word. Do your own testing and find evidence for yourself. So profitable, what does that mean? Well, profitable is at least a 51% win rate with a 1:1 risk-to-reward. That's still an edge. If you're trading a lot of size, this is profitable and you'll make money on that. So, you want to find a system that is at least a 51% win rate at a 1:1 risk-to-reward. And then the truth is you can optimize that in the future. So if you find that and you truly have an edge there and you know it's it's replicable and you can show up and you can get an edge from that, you can then optimize it to increase your strike rate, to increase your risk-to-reward. So over time you can optimize, you cut your loss quick losses quicker, you can let your uh winners run um you can increase your risk. So you can do multiple things to optimize this in the future. But to start off, you need to make sure your edge is profitable. So the way you do that is by testing, running simulations and running back testing to see that it's actually profitable. mechanical, replicable, testable, profitable, at least a 51% win rate at a 1:1 risk-to-reward. If it's not, go find a different strategy. Now, traders, I've put this as a free template in my bulletproof 2.0 trading mindset course. It's completely free. It's at the end of the course. I've added my personal mechanical trading plan template into that to ensure traders are building their systems properly and they have an actual profitable trading plan, a mechanical trading plan. So, if you don't already have one, make sure you sign up to that free course, go to the end of that course, and download the template I provide in that. So, traders, really before you start risking significant amounts of money and going through your funded challenges, you need to have a mechanical system that you've tested and you have specific entries, exits, and a specific risk management protocol in place to ensure that you're trading a system that's profitable. Don't be one of the traders that wastes years and tens of thousands of dollars trading a system that isn't even profitable and you end up acrewing an enormous amount of emotional baggage and an enormous amount of financial loss because you skipped one of the most important steps which is having a foundational and profitable and mechanical trading strategy. Now, in the next video, I'm going to show you how you can stick to this trading strategy. But if you found this video useful and you got some insights, make sure you like and subscribe. This tells YouTube it's valuable content and it pushes it out to a wider audience. Now, before you click away, make sure you watch the next video that's going to pop up on your screen. That's going to give you a really good introductory insight into my mindset principles so that you're prepared for my next video