After a big red day, you're always sitting there with yourself thinking, how do I deal with this Of course I've had the situation of throwing my computer across the room sometimes I'll try to bury the pain with ice cream, just try to eat the heartache away. just make it disappear. I've just had enough. Of course, when that doesn't work, sometimes you drive to the liquor store and you get a case of your favorite alcohol.

Maybe it's some whiskey, some Jin some tequila, some vodka. Maybe you mix them all together. see where that lands you. Well, next thing you know, you're staring into the mirror crying, saying, who am I what's wrong with me and why did I lose so much money today Of course, by the end of it, you'll find yourself curled up on the floor in the fetal position, rocking back and forth.

and that's never the way you like to end your day. So what we're going to do here today is talk about loss and maybe some better ways to handle the emotions that come with being a full-time Trader Now losing is something that we all experience from time to time. Of course on Monday I closed the day with um, $2600 in losses and I went through all of those emotions, the frustration, the anger, uh, the heartache and at the end of it, um, I was able to come back to the knowledge that I'm the same Trader who's up $157,000 on the year as of today I've bounced back and I'm up 161,000 on the year. Despite those gains, I've had 10 losing days this year that have cost me a total of $33,000 in losses.

and that's painful, right? There's no way around that having a day where you lose $5,000 or $6,000 is a frustrating thing to have happen. And it's not something that's going to happen. Uh, you know, if you're working almost any other job, you know you don't usually lose money when you go to work. Typically, you make money, You go to work, you know you, you do your 9 to-5 You walk away at the end of the day and you've got a profit.

Well, that's not true with day trading and it's also not true with being self-employed no matter what type of uh job you may have. If you're um, you know, running a fishing boat. maybe you know you have an oil leak and you've got to replace part of the engine and that's going to cost you $5,000 So I think these are some of the struggles that come with being self-employed and a lot of the people that are interested in learning how to be uh, you know, full-time day. Traders And uh, self-sufficient are the type of people that are entrepreneurs and that have their own businesses or have wanted to in the past.

So some of these emotions may not be completely unfamiliar. but uh, for me, when I started trading, it was something that I wasn't expecting and in reality one of the biggest obstacles to trading success for most. Traders and I Say this. having worked with thousands of students are the emotions.

It can be extremely difficult to handle loss right? Think of a a home builder, right? You do construction, but every 3 weeks someone comes along and knocks down half of the house that you just built and you've got to rebuild it. Sure, you're making progress, but every couple weeks someone comes along and knocks down part of part part of your your work. How frustrating would that be? Well as day Traders that's something that we actually deal with on pretty much a weekly basis. You take three steps forward and one big step back.

So over the course of the week hopefully you made a net Pro Profit of you know, two steps forward. it's not always going to be the case. You have to get used to getting knocked down and rebuilding, having that ability, having that mentality to get back up on the horse after a big red day and my worst losing day ever was over $330,000 right? But if I hadn't gotten back on the horse and fought through those emotions I wouldn't be here today. You know I've had to fight through all of this same stuff and so for a lot of beginner Traders Uh, these types of frustrations and setbacks can be enough to, uh, knock you out of the game.

You know, because you can fall into that, uh, that dangerous cycle of Revenge trading? Uh, which is when you in response to a big loss, start trading more and more aggressively to try to recover. uh to try to you know, compensate to get out of the hole nine times out of 10 makes the hole twice as deep. and you know some. Traders they They really get broken down emotionally after having a few big losses, trying to bounce back, getting bigger losses, and in reality you can blow up your account in a matter of 10 minutes making bad decisions which is a scary thing.

You always have to be in control. You can't allow your emotions to guide your trading. Behavior So if you find yourself trading from a place of anger or frustration, it's a really good idea to shut down the platform and walk away right to throw in the towel for the day. I Learned that the hard way as a beginner Trader I would get frustrated I would get angry and I would continue to trade.

And of course, when you're already agitated and you keep trading, you know the the next loss that happens is just going to make you even more agitated. I Sometimes talk about um, you know race car driving when you're driving a race car and you make a mistake and you crash the car, You're done right. You're out of the race. You've got to go fix your car and you'll come back.

You know next. Friday night for the next race. But with trading, when you make a mistake, well, you can take another trade immediately so you don't get time to think about and reflect on why that mistake happened, you have to force yourself to take the time to reflect. And one of the things that I um, fortunately always did after a really big losing day as a beginner Trader is I would pour over all of my data I would look look at my Excel docs right I would try to understand where I went wrong and how I can prevent myself from having uh, this kind of situation happen again now inevitably I did make the same mistake more than once from time to time and it did, uh, take months and and really years for me to develop the level of self-awareness and emotional control.

Uh, to you know, trade through the ups and downs that will be part of every stock market but here I am today. So what I can tell you from you know my own experiences and from working with so many students is that there are a few things you can do today to help you get better at handling loss. The first thing you can do is track all of your trades in an Excel doc, track all those trades and categorize them by the type of trade it was. Uh, the the setup, the strategy, the time of day, the price you can actually down download.

you know my free Doc Um, it's uh on Warrior trading under Free Trading tools and you can use that. it's a template. it's the same uh document that I use every day by doing that you're creating. You know this historical data that you can go back and look at when you're having one of those bad days.

and I do this for students almost every single day. I Look at these trade sheets. Sometimes they send them to me after they've had a bad day, other times it's just part of our uh routine Mentor session and what I look for are statistics I try to understand their data. what are they good at? What are they bad at? Where can they use Improvement where should they focus their energy? It always helps when you have a bad day to create a game plan and the first start of the game plan for me was always looking back at my data and then I would say okay you know what can I do tomorrow to improve my trading and if I had a big loss, let's say I was trading news or let's say I was chasing a stock and I bought bought it way too high I would tell myself okay tomorrow you need to only take trades that have a really strong five minute setup.

no scalping the one minute, no chasing news if I can't print out a you know a screen capture of that chart and you know, tack it to my wall and look at it tomorrow and say that was a great setup. I shouldn't take the trade to begin with so that means that uh, you're increasing this the quality standard for every trade you take. right? By increasing the quality standard, you're going to increase your accuracy and you're going to reduce the number of times that you're losing. right? it? It's obviously easier to do deal with loss if you lose less, so by increasing your quality standard you increase your accuracy.

You have better results. That's the first thing you can do all right now. The second thing you can do and something that I would uh encourage every Trader to do is have have a Max loss. You need to know that Line in the Sand where when you cross it you're done for the day.

For me, my Max loss is $11,000 So granted I had a $2,600 loss on Monday. It's because by the time I was uh, down, more than $1,000 I was holding 10,000 shares and by the time my order got filled, the loss was 2600. But because I have that Max loss I was not able to initiate create a new trade that day. So yes, I can close my positions whether it's down 5,000 or 6,000 or 2,000 But once I'm down below a th in net losses I can't take any new trades I did that uh to create that uh that period of time for reflection, right? I actually had my broker put this on my account.

so I delegate that responsibility to my broker and I'm not going to call them when I'm really frustrated and say hey, can you you know, can you take away my Max loss for the day And that's just too embarrassing And I wouldn't do it So by having that on my account I have not taken one trade since being down more than $1,000 and that's what stopped me from having a day where I go from being down 2 or 3,000 to being down 6 or seven or 8,000 so it's kept the losing days smaller right? You can do that and that will really help you. You want to delegate some of these really hard tasks to your broker because they want to see you succeed. They don't want to see you blow up your account and close your account, right? That's bad for their business. So if they can do something to help you be successful, they're going to do it.

So start tracking your trades in an Excel Doc only take the best quality trades. Okay, have a Max loss on your account. All right. Those are two things you can do today to help you.

One reduce the losses and two, uh, you know, prevent the situ sitation of having Revenge trading and snowball uh days and then uh Lastly, what? I encourage all of our students to do is to take notes while you're trading. If you're looking at a setup and you're thinking I'm going to get in this quickly, write down how much you're risking. Okay, what's your stop? Because so many Traders get into trades and they don't know what their risk is. You don't risk $10,000 to make a 100, right? You risk 10,000 to make 20,000 But most of the time I've talked to a Trader who lost $10,000 It was not because they had the potential to make 20,000 it's because they got into a trade looking for $400 or $500 profit and you know they.

They screwed up and held it and held it and held it. and next thing you know, you know they're down1 $20,000 Whatever. it might be all right. So you always have to know what you stand to lose.

Now you you will have losses as a Trader Uh, my accuracy varies between 65% and 70% at its highest. That means every single month. Uh yeah, 30% of my trades are going to be wrong. So I've had lots of practice losing and I can say from all of this practice and all of this experience that losing is not a big deal.

It's not something to be afraid of, it's part of our job. What we have to be able to do is manage the loss, keep the losses small, and most importantly not allow not allow ourselves to get, uh, emotionally, uh, you know, ruffled from the loss to the point where it impacts our trading. So this requires a pretty high level of um, self-awareness and I have it. At this point, you know there are days where uh I'll be sitting here and I feel in my chest this frustration building.

you know, the blood pressure? Rising You know and it's not always caused by trading, it can be caused by you know, something else going on in my life. But once it starts I know that I'm I'm feeling frustrated I'm feeling aggravated I'm more apt to make you know kind of a a hasty decision with a trade and that's not when I'm on my on my game. You know, in this market we're trading against some of the best traders in the world and some of those Traders are making you know millions of dollars a year. So if you're going to compete against those kind of Traders you need to always be on your aame.

For me, trading two hours a day I find that I really can only be on my aame even at best for about two hours I Can't hold myself to maintain discipline very well through you know, the entire day from 9:30 until 400 p.m. I Learned that by studying my track record and studying the historical data right I learned this trend that I did really well in the morning and I gave back money in the afternoon. So I made the commitment to stop trading in the afternoon. you know I found that I had had a lot of losses on breaking news.

So I made a commitment to trade it less and when I took trades on it I traded with smaller size. you have to adapt to the market and you have to, you know, make adjustments to your strategy based on your results. So this is something that I'm going to uh, you know, happily help you with. for all of our students that are in the Warrior Pro courses I like to go over your trade sheets I like to see what you're doing I like to check in Uh students that are in that Uh class are also trading on the simulus later and that allows me to really watch what you're doing in real time.

So if you're making mistakes, you know I can see that and I can help, uh, point you in the right direction. All right guys. So uh I hope this is helpful I know that you may be watching this you know after having a red day and I hope it helps you know helps you kind of see the light and cheer up a little bit. Uh, maybe you're watching this having just finished a great day and and so I'm I'm happy for you if that's the case.

But regardless of the situation, uh, you guys can always email me Ross Warriortrading.com I've been there, you know I've gone through trading um, ups and downs and I'm here as a sounding board or just a vent you guys can always reach out. So all right, Thanks guys! I'll talk to you guys soon.