WINNING OBSERVATIONS

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
~ Marcus Aurelius

Coaching people goes deep.

It requires a high degree of observation, inquiry and problem solving beyond the bounds of what we normally think of as education.

Instead of talking to people at a distance on a one-to-many basis, you end up talking directly to people on a far more personal level, assessing their responses and reactions to the information you provide and digging under the surface to understand what moves them to and away from the actions they need to take.

It doesn’t take long before the conversation focuses on the person’s history, their emotions, the root of their concerns and the source of their resilience.

After one year of working with traders, here are some key observations:

1) The game is truly mental and emotional.

I haven’t met a single person who can’t trade.

Everyone knows how to win, and wins big on occasion, but consistency and systematic trading is something else. You don’t need every technical piece to solve this puzzle. Just enough of a process to maintain clarity on whether the market is moving in the way that suits what you can confidently do.

People tend to be limited not by their results to date, but by the weight of their expectations. High achieving professionals who want to become successful traders are usually way too hard on themselves and are negatively impacted by every losing trade. They see it as an outright setback and a comment on their self worth, instead of feedback on their strategy.

Traders who start to turn things around are the ones who realise they need to step back a bit from the outright desire to win, assess where they’re at and give themselves more room to breathe in order to operate at a greater capacity and higher levels of creativity.

In a strange way, recognising that it’s a personal growth journey makes sense when you stop taking the results so personally.

2) Every system requires skills, standards and habits.

The perspectives, patterns and price action we use to trade markets are like a custom suit of principles and best practice that require constant alteration as you grow, observe your behaviours and analyse your results. Nothing stays static.

Positive routines need to become ingrained habits, or the market will tend to switch up and catch you offside. The outcome of each trade becomes less of a factor longer term success than the routines which precede and follow each trade. The professional approach requires thoroughness, regardless of where you’re at with your results. The right level of preparation mitigates the need for the sense of competition in key moments, which can lead to impulsive reactions and overwhelm.

You can never beat the market, you can only learn to flow better with it.

3) The best traders stay in motion.

Bias is absolutely the biggest problem we have as traders. Every discussion about a bad losing trade usually starts with a point of conjecture about what actually happened.

“The price shouldn’t be going there”

“I thought that it would go this way”

Those simple yet subjective conclusions cause most of the problems. Winning traders are able to pivot very quickly on key information and stay in motion with the market because they know exactly what they do best. If the market’s going the other way, they can mentally flip the chart and work with their system, having developed it enough to remain calm and rational.

4) Every price action system/concept/method works (but not 100%).

Retail trading is full of complex language and as I continue to work with people, more and more ways of looking at price action come up. There’s a lot of overlap in these different approaches and they all work, but none are foolproof.

It’s ultimately in the hands of the trader expressing an idea with an executed position, based on what they can perceive and what they can do systematically.

There’s constant debate about which way is better, but it down to the operator to make best use of it and find repeatability and scaleability through adaptation.

5) What you want to happen almost never happens.

Wants and needs absolutely get punished in markets, almost as a universal law. The more you try to force your will on the market, the more the win tends to elude you. That isn’t a certifiable fact, more of a sinking feeling every trader gets when they know they’ve jumped in because they really want something to go their way, or they’re too focused on the size of the potential win (in their head).

Markets will forever be neutral, uncaring and sometimes brutal. When we work on systems, we move way from seeking predictability through hindsight and excessive risk, to assessing probabilities and odds through knowing our setups and framing asymmetric risk reward ideas.

We all want to win.

All we can do is find better ways to win.

P.

CONSISTENCY starts again on 29th April.

In September 2022, this started out as a trading course focused on systems, to a coaching program focused on self development for ambitious traders who eventually want to trade full time.

I’ve learned so much in the last 7 months and the groups have been amazing to work with. There have been some massive wins and I think the best is still to come, but my main aim for everyone who joins is that they see a clear path to understanding what they do best, making their investment back as fast as possible and compounding the results from there, independently and efficiently. The freedom we want is outside the time we have to spend in the market, and what makes me happiest is seeing people level up in other aspects of their life while becoming better traders.

Sounds lofty, but we’re all in on the proposition that getting better at something requires development in all areas. Trading is a money game we’re playing in the bigger game of life.

Things move quickly in the digital age, and I have revised what CONSISTENCY offers to make it more effective for people who really want to get this done for themselves.

There is now a free lifetime alumni group for people who have completed the program, where we continue to run education calls and dive deep into what moves markets and how to profit from it.

Information is what most of us are constantly seeking, but it’s execution that moves the needle of personal growth. Add strategy, accountability and community to that equation and I think it’s impossible to not get better.