You know what’s interesting? Trust. How many times have you back tested strategies and during the back testing, you realized that this strategy actually works! When I was a well known dating coach, I knew a cool guy that used to come and help out at the boot camps. He was great at talking to everybody but he would never go and do the things he said he would. This is because he allowed his fear and his “this won’t work for me syndrome” to take over. In trading, it’s the exact same thing but it comes down to you actually feeling vulnerable.
Now, you can sit in front of charts on TradingView and you can back test like crazy but when it comes down to the execution, your mind takes over. When your mind takes over, all hell breaks loose. You see, your mind is a terrible place to be. It’s like a bad neighborhood at times. You go in, you back test and you sit there and you look and you say to yourself, “oh my God, it would have made like thirty on the swing trade.” Or “Oh my God, it would have made ten more on this swing trade.” Or, “Oh my God, this method is so good. It’s unbelievable! It can’t be this easy”. What it actually is, is patterns of patterns. Patterns are being played out by humans and bots and patterns are recurring things that happen in all aspects of life. So, it really is that easy.
What’s not easy is why I started the group, Mental Toughness. What’s not easy is the human mind. Trading is eighty five to ninety percent mental. So here you have this amazing system and it works fantastically, specifically when you back trade. As a matter of fact, today I went through my system and realized it would have made 37 dollars on a NVDA trade that I didn’t take because I didn’t see it. Every Saturday morning, I go back and look at the hourly chart for the last twenty days and I look at the patterns for the last twenty days as well. I’ll see how they played out and or how much money I would have made if I played out those patterns. The only problem is, when we go and we see our alerts, we often become vulnerable. When we become vulnerable, we tend to overly micromanage the trade. Instead of just allowing the trade to go and do what it’s supposed to do. We micromanage every little jerk of the market, every pullback, every little red bar, green, borrowed and depending on where you’re going, it will always make us feel some type of emotion.
When we feel some type of emotion and when you don’t stay in the trade, we get out. But, when you back test the trades, some work to target some ot of the time. Target one target 2. Sometimes it doesn’t get to target 2 and goes back and normally, you would just stop yourself out for a break, even on the back end. But when you trade, trading becomes very simple especially when you work on your mindset. The vulnerability is what’s killing your trading and the fear that the vulnerability brings out is killing your trading. So here’s something I need you to do. I need you to start trading. Take a Monday as a starting date and just do your system no matter how hard it might be to sit in a trade. No matter how many feelings and emotions from every green and red candle that come up, just stick with the trade.
You need to learn to walk away and you need to play your system and most importantly, you need to let that system work itself out. Trust me, at the end of twenty trades . Take a look and see how much more money you would have made because you didn’t get in the way of your own self. You will learn to no longer self sabotage. You will no longer allow vulnerability and fear to overrun your trading. How many more times do you need to mentally masturbate backtesting before you actually do it. That’s what we go through in Mental Toughness. We strive to get past the mental masturbation and get past the fear. And most importantly, you learn to become a systematic trader who’s able to realize that you’re going to lose and win but as long as you win more than you lose, you are going to be highly profitable and highly successful!
David Wygant
