Why Are You a Trader?

Okay, we are going to do an informal trader Tip Tuesday today. In fact, I'm gonna break all kinds of rules, because I'm gonna do this trader Tip Tuesday while I'm actually driving. So if I'm not looking at the camera the whole time, you understand why. So I've got a lot on my mind that I want to share with you today that I just think is really important. So rather than putting together the PowerPoint, setting everything up, and then talking through the PowerPoint going through zoom. I'm just turning on this fucking camera and I'm just going to talk with you. All right. First of all, I want to ask you a really important question. You watch me, you watch trader Tip Tuesday, because you are interested in being a trader, or you are a trader? So the question I have for you is, why are you a trader? Why do you even want to do this? Are you clear about your reasons?A

Are you clear about your purpose? Because people come to training for all kinds of reasons. It's really important to understand why you're here, what you're up to. Because if you come for the wrong reasons, you are going to waste your time, and you are going to get fucking chewed up. Everybody is going to tell you how amazing trading is. Trading is amazing, but it's amazing for certain people. It is not amazing for everybody. For a lot of people who come into this game, they're entering a game that they end up facing massive heartache, massive losses, loss of self esteem, loss of friends, loss of family, they go through incredible pain. They leave their jobs to go do this only to fail. Now the stat is 80% of all traders lose money and most of those go broke, like bust. They blow out their accounts. Okay, so now that's actually not that different than people that start a business, 80% of all businesses fail. So there's a 80/20 rule going on in trading just like everything else. The thing is that losses and trading can be really traumatic, they can actually change your personality. You ever seen a degenerate gambler? A degenerate gambler is no different than a heroin addict, an alcoholic, a sex addict. In their addiction, they lose who they are, they lose their identity and as they lose their identity, they end up living in a place of massive guilt, and massive shame and they end up in a trap that they cannot get out of. They seek one last hit, one last thrill, but whenever they go to get the hit or the thrill, it's short lived and it always ends badly. So for a gambler, it is going and finding some more money to go either buy lottery tickets, or go to the casino or call the bookie or go to DraftKings or whatever it may be. That's where they're going. Well, guess what? There's this other place that gamblers can go all the time that nobody questions and that is the market. You can go trade. 

Why are you trading? Now in this context, I want to talk about something specific today and that is, there is a belief that money solves our problems. If I just had more money, everything would be fine. That is a false belief. It's a fallacy. It is a lie. More money is not going to solve your problems. Money does not solve problems. Money is an amplifier of them. I'll say this again, money does not solve your problems. Money is an amplifier of your problems. It is an amplifier of you and your personality. So if you're a good guy, money will make you a better guy. If you are an asshole, money will make you a bigger asshole. It's not going to change who you are. It's going to make you more of who you are. This is important to understand because there's this belief of I just have more money solves all my problems. I've got friends, I've got people I've coached years back, brought them up. They became incredibly successful traders, made millions of dollars, some of them Hundreds of millions of dollars, okay, like we're talking big, big money. 

All right now these people on the surface seem to have it all. They're millionaires. They make millions of dollars. They have multiple houses. They drive Bentleys and Ferraris, they have private jets, they have yachts, they have all of this stuff that everybody admires them for and guess what? They've gone through these periods where they were fucking miserable. Got strung out on drugs, all of a sudden, somebody who's like a great person, high character finds themselves sitting in the back room of a private club, in a bar in Chicago, doing coke off the table in the back. Why does this happen? If money solved all the problems, why would that ever happen, you shouldn't be doing fucking coke in the back. If you did money, solve your problems, you should be happy. Well, guess what? Their marriages sucked. Their marriages bombed out and when their marriages failed the hole that was created inside of them, though, all the money in the world could not fill that hole. They were lost. They are heartbroken and they didn't know where to go and part of it was in the beginning, because they have the belief that money solves the problems, guess what kind of women they're attracting into their lives. The kind of women that are about money, not about them and so when the wives became drug addicts, or the wives cheated on, or the wives slept around, or whatever it was, each of them is a different case, they were heartbroken and almost didn't recover. So if money solves all your problems, why do they have those problems? They had all the money in the world and they were totally miserable. 

See, for me, the reason I'm having this conversation with you, the reason that I do these trader tip Tuesday's, the reason that I do shark coach is I want you to live an amazing life. That's what I want for you. I want you to live an amazing life and I want the money that comes from trading to help you build an amazing life with the understanding that the money alone will never, ever do it for you. So what do I want for you? I want you to have a great spiritual relationship, I want you to know who God is, for some of you that's gonna push buttons, but guess what? You can be an atheist, you can deny the existence of God, you can go on all or down the road of this, okay? But God's still there, whether you believe them or not, whether you hate him or not, he's still there. You might think you can deny his existence. But guess what? He doesn't really give a shit whether you think he's real or not, he's still there. So are you going to have a relationship with God, a relationship, that His purpose, His mission for you, comes to you and through you? Where you become a force for good in this world, where you are somebody that impacts now your spouse and children, but people around you, and you're making the world a better place. Now, for a lot of men, that's a cool idea, but that is secondary. Because you know what? My friend Garrett says, When you get down to men, it's really simple. It's get paid and get laid, get paid and get laid. That's what men want. They want to make money and they want to use that money to go get laid. Now getting laid, it doesn't mean that they want to sleep around with everybody. What it does mean is that they want to be tied to a woman that they really believe in and that they're gonna pour their heart and soul into and yeah, they're gonna have a lot of sex with her. 

Money gives men status. Money gives man significance. So men want this, this is their chip and then when they have this chip, they use this to get the woman that they want. So for most men, if they can make money and get the woman and everything else starts to fall in place. So let's not bullshit about it. Let's just say okay, that's the truth. A lot of you, that's the case. There's nothing wrong with that. So we start there and then out of that, what men find is they start making money and they have the woman they like and everything should be great, in some respects is great, but something's missing and that's something that's missing is often the spiritual component. It is the purpose driven component. So it can come first, it can come later, is going to come. That question is going to be presented to you in some shape or form. I can tell it because if you're not that kind of person, you wouldn't even be watching me right now. 

Okay, then the next component is our B, our body. Our next component is our body. Where's our body? Are we strong or are we weak? Is it a temple or is it a shack? Do we love on it or do we destroy it? When we're strong, when we're strong in our body, we have abundant energy we have focus, we have stamina, we have perseverance. Somebody in shape can do things that somebody that is not in shape cannot do and often our body ends up being a reflection of all the other problems. So men when they have problems, what do they do, they sedate. They escape, they sedate to escape. Some of you do it with food. Some of you do with alcohol, some of you do drugs, some of you do a porn, some of you do video games, but you're escaping. In this escape is typically something that destroys the body and makes the body less and when your body's less you have less capability. You have less capacity to be able to do the things you want. So what I want for you is I want you to have an amazing life, I want you to have it all. I want you to have a spiritual relationship. I want you to have a great marriage, I want you to have a great family. I want you to be strong in your body and I want you to make a lot of money for the right reasons. That when you make the money, the money amplifies your relationship with God. It amplifies your marriage, it amplifies your relationship with your children, it amplifies your body. Money buys you freedom, it buys you flexibility to make choices, make better choices. So I want to help you live this kind of life. You don't really give a shit, how you do it. I want to help you to live that kind of life. You're here because you want to do it in trading. So my challenge to you is, is trading the best vehicle for you?

I had a call with a woman this week, was a doctor, she's still a doctor. She's semi-retired. She's a radiologist and has done really well, she's got a lot of money. She's been trying to trade for 10 years. What was really interesting is just in one conversation about reframing how she viewed her wealth, realizing that she could have lots of money, lots of cash flow, live the life that she wanted and retire once and for all and she could do that really simply, like literally in five minutes on the phone, I said one thing to her and her face just like, like she's kept. I said, calculated, figure it out, tell me where you're at. She figured it out and she's like, she kept checking it because she couldn't believe it and she realized that she was this close. She was one shift away from having everything that she wanted. But she's living in this frame all the time that I got to trade, I got to trade to be able to retire, I got to trade to have the life I want. She didn't need to do that. So guess what? In a moment, all of that was stripped away and we find out whether she really wants to trade or not. That's where you need to be. Do you really want to trade? 

I'll say one last thing. We'll wrap this up. I call it the love of the game. The love of the game. Michael Jordan when Michael Jordan was drafted by the Chicago Bulls. The best player in the Chicago Bulls is a guy named Gene Banks and that summer Gene Banks went and played in a pickup game, out on the playground, and he tore his ACL. Back then, tearing your ACL was like a death sentence, it ended your career. So Gene Banks tore his ACL and the Chicago Bulls said we're not paying you. You were playing on the playground, you were not playing in a sanction event for the team, your contract is void. Michael Jordan saw this and when you negotiate his rookie deal with the Bulls, he put something in his contract and nobody had before. That clause he put in his contract was called the love of the game clause. What was the love the game clause? It was the clause in his contract that said that Michael Jordan could play wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with whoever he wanted anytime and the Chicago Bulls could not say anything about it, they could not void his contract. Michael Jordan was famous for playing in random pickup games with random people. Not just NBA players or stars, but high school kids, older men, playgrounds. He'd just show up and play because he loved to play. So for you, when you're assessing whether you want to be a trader or not, what are your reasons behind it? I always come back to the love of the game. Do you love trade? Do you love markets? Forget the money. Do you love markets? There's one aspect people who really love trading, many of them will tell you that trading is a spiritual experience and we'll talk about this more in a future video. Trading is a spiritual experience and so you go down the road, people who love trading and what they find, what do they learn? They find themselves, they learn about who they truly are. They learn about really what works in the economy and what doesn't. Governments can say whatever they want. Free markets are bigger than a government. Over any length of time, the free market always beats the government. Remember that. So why are you trading? I look forward to hearing your answer. Thanks for listening.