You all right, let's make this happen. So this is today's gonna be my ninth day of trading in Italy On this on this trip this would be my third trip to Europe Well where I came on the trip and then in day traded pretty much the whole time and on my second trip I ended up having a big loss on the very first day of the trip. what happened was I got off the plane I flew from JFK to to Venice Italy and the flight got in it like I don't know, eight in the morning a local time Italian time got to the hotel, got settled in by noontime and the market opens at 3:30 p.m. So I was like alright, you know I'm gonna trade well like let's do it and I think I I overestimated my sort of mental state.

The reality is after a seven eight hour flight and you know three hours on either side of traveling, you are not at peak performance. That is not the time that you go out on the court and you know play in the NBA Finals you got to be rested. You got to be. you know, well rested, well fed, in a good mental spot and you know? So I ended up jumping in the market taking a loss and pretty much immediately being down like 8,000 dollars and that was the beginning of the last trip to Italy You would think that I would learn from these mistakes sadly I don't always learn from these mistakes and so on.

This trip on day two ended up losing $14,000 and that's relative. Now to my accounts being bigger trading with bigger size being more aggressive and yeah, it was. It was not a good, not a good situation. So basically you know what happened on that day: I I think that it was sort of the typical the typical thing that I do which is I get my mind sort of set on trying to have a big win and we had this setup started.

the GoPros a little squeaky here. we had this setup that you know if I traded it back at home and I was on my home trading station. I probably would have taken the eight ten thousand dollars of profit that I had and not tried to swing for the fences, but I just decided that I wanted to try to be a hero go for a really big win and what ended up happening was I went from being up $10,000 on the stock to down $10,000 on the stock and by the time I press the sell button I was locking up a $14,000 loser which is just ridiculous and I was at sort of the bottom of a red streak I had been read the previous week and I think I was trying to bounce back. you know, in this sort of heroic fashion got a bus coming through so I ended up just getting myself into a real pickle and whatever took took the loss.

spent the rest of the week trying to just sort of mentally bounce back and and you know, put me in this position of just really being on the on the defensive. So you know this has happened to me several times. where I've had you know I've had red streaks and I think in some ways what defines a traitor are our biggest wins and biggest losses. Those are the highs and lows of our career.

My biggest winner was a day where I made over $40,000 You know, Biggest Loser right now is a day where I lost 30 grand and I remember those days very clearly. Everything else is sort of the in-between stuff. but the $14,000 red day on the second day of the trip here put a little bit of a cloud on things. I just had this goal of trying to make while I was on this trip $25,000 you can see these fellows working on the side of the road.

Average income in Italy is $26,000 US dollars per year you know, which? Think about it, a lot of money. like a hundred dollars a day. So I set this goal that if I could make twenty five thousand dollars during my trip here, that that would be a pretty cool thing. and and to prove and even inspire perhaps some local Italians that hey, you know there's another, there's another option out there.

You know you can trade the market side by side with me the way Roberto does and you know I think Cameron full year he made $75,000 That was three times the average household income. you know I mean that's that's awesome and to do it in one hour a day have to be out in the Sun working hard. Pretty cool. So anyways now very beginning of the trip.

I Ended up taking this big loss and so far this week I've made about ten thousand dollars. So I'm digging my way out of the hole and I made seven thousand last Friday Earth last Thursday So I'm back to actually I think I'm now Green on the trip which is good but I've got a ways to go before I hit my $25,000 mental target you know, and this is sort of. The thing about trading is that you're not a traitor until you've had a catastrophic loss that is shaking you, forced you to reevaluate everything you do. Oh my God.

there's a cat in the road so it's gonna happen to every single one you betray. You're gonna have a day where you take a big loss and it's a combination of things going a little bit wrong. You got a little too aggressive at the wrong time. you know you you let phone will get the best to you.

You bought a stock totally the wrong price. you know, whatever the case may be, it'll happen. And what's really going to define you is how you're able to recover from that red day not just financially, but in maybe even a more important way emotionally. for me, when I had the the biggest loss, the biggest red day of my trading career I was I was only about two and a half three years into my career and I had had a stretch where I was I was actually making money I was doing well and you know a lot of you guys have attended workshops I've done where I talked about how I had this a turning point and it was in August and through the rest of the year I I was trading really well but the following fall in March the following March or April I don't remember which month it was it was March I had a day where I took a couple of losses I was down like I don't know two three, four thousand dollars may have been close to five thousand dollars I was had a red day and at that point I was below my max loss I mean I was but I still sat in front of the computer and at that time I was listening to a news feed and I heard over the news feed, the stock spiking up, moving higher and I looked at it and it was like a hundred dollars a share and it just spiked up from like $80 a share and there was some news chatter that it was related to, possible a possible takeover or buyout and I jumped into it I just impulsively pressed the Buy button and I ended up just dropping right back to $80 and I lost 25 grand.

It happened so fast and just like that I was down thirty thousand dollars which was giving back the last three months of profit and it was like wow in five minutes I just gave back three months. How do I even how do I even mentally recover from that? I mean this is this just feels so devastating and you know I stepped back and I really encourage you guys. Any time you have a big loss, the first thing you need to do is shut down your computer and walk away from the computer because if I have walked away off on that day down $5,000 as disappointing as being down 5 grand is, it can be a whole lot worse. So first of all, shut it down and walk away and get away from the computer.

You can't just sit there, you know, and and watch the market and think that you're gonna have the ability not to jump in because it's just not realistic. So you guys shut it down, walk away, come back once the markets closed and review your trades and that's what I ended up doing. so I came back and I reviewed the trade I was like so what what happened and that's when I started to develop that sense of awareness of what my triggers are that turn a bad day into a terrible day or potentially could be a career-ending day for some traders. and so what I realized was that first of all, on that day I was read on to other stocks and so basically everything else I had traded I was I was read on.

So I was like wrong, wrong. So I was starting to get a little frustrated about being wrong on you know, multiple trades back-to-back and then I was sort of still sitting around hoping maybe something would pop up that would miraculously give me an opportunity to get out of the hole which is sort of like a fear of missing out thing. you know it's I don't want to close the day read: so I'm gonna sit here and I'm just gonna wait for something. but I'm much more likely to jump on anything that moves because I'm sort of in a place of desperation, right? And so of course you know I ended up hearing a stock on the newsfeed popping up and it was popping up and I impulsively jumped in before I really thought about my risk management and just like that, it was like I was in and then it started dropping and now I just had to work with the position.

So what I ended up realizing was there's a certain a certain couple of things that can trigger me or sort of are triggers for me to become more impulsive, more aggressive, and not in a good way. And the first one is if I've had usually more than three read trades in a row: back-to-back losses Two back-to-back losses. Okay, that's fine, that sometimes happens. a third back-to-back loss.

Now you know you're just kind of getting frustrated by the market. You're just getting slapped around a little bit and it's just not working. So three read trades in a row? that's time to step back because now I'm starting to like. You know, try to swing harder and harder at each trade that comes up cuz you may start to feel like you got to make up for those three losses and you're just.

it's just compensating for it. It's not good. So the new rule I put in place, which was a result of this process of self-awareness was that if I have three consecutive losses at that point, I shut down the computer and walk away because if I keep trading beyond that, there's a high likelihood that I'm gonna get impulsive, aggressive, and in a bad way. The second was at that point I called my broker and said hey, I need you guys to put a max loss on my account if I'm down and I think I said it at $5,000 I think I said it at 5 grand I don't remember, but it was five.

If I'm down more than $5,000 disable my account and don't let me take any new positions until the next day. That way, if I have a day where I am down five eight thousand dollars which is a place that is definitely going to make me feel emotional, frustrated, and angry I simply can't trade so I can't take out that emotion of frustration on the market I gotta just I have no choice but to step away and and those were those are really the two big ones because you know I was like okay, I've got it I've got a ship that's on. Let's say the strategy is my ship. My ship is staying afloat.

but every now and then I take on a lot of water in the form of losses and you know that just cuts down the profit margin and it just feels, you know, devastating now. I'm gonna have to spend the next three months just digging myself out of the hole. but as I recovered from that loss with these new rules in place, I felt like I had become a more disciplined trader. I started getting really focused on trying to have consecutive green days even if they were small.

and one of the things that I reminded myself of is that if starting today, I can make $200 a day. For instance, I'm gonna be making $50,000 a year and all the losses of the past there water under the bridge I will eventually make back all of them I don't need to be daily looking at you know my total P&L and see that I'm still down 28,000 Then you know, working my way back to break-even just I'm putting that a hundred percent aside and I'm just gonna focus on making my $200 a day. You know, because if I can do that and I can master it and I can prove that I'm better than having these big losses, then you know from that point forward, life is good and I've got it. So it did take me months to recover from that loss.

and at that time my account I mean since August had grown from like $25,000 right at the cusp of the P80 rule which in those days I didn't know there were brokers that you can use to trade with accounts of smallest 500 bucks. so I just didn't even know that was an option. But in any case, I had grown the account from $25,000 in September up to right around 50,000 or 56,000 took the $30,000 loss and was right back to like $26,000 in the account. I mean it was like knocked it right back down.

so I was like okay, I'm starting over and and I was scared because I you know was like whoa. Maybe you know me, How many times can this keep happening before I'm done? You know what if it had been a $40,000 loss and I was $10,000 below the PDT rule phe level and you know I have to be able to take out profit for you know, for for coughs, cost-of-living I can't just keep taking three steps forward and then one massive step back back to square one. So I was scared and I think that fear of feeling up against the wall made me even more focused on being disciplined. and so I one of the other things I did as I stopped I stopped watching the news and listening to the news while I was trading because I found that that was making me just do we or take weird trades on high priced stocks which is not even what I was typically making money on.

That was like gambling essentially and I was like I gotta stop doing that So I cut that stuff out and let's see I said oh I I started doing something kind of funny at I think it was 10:30 each day I would unplug my laptop and I'd go put it in the car and I was like I'm done I'm not looking at the market I don't care if a stock runs up 400% this afternoon, I'm not going to know about until tomorrow. I'm gonna trade during the time of day that I have peak performance and that's it. And and the next thing I did I was like I'm gonna stop comparing myself to other people because you know I think we all can fall into that habit and you guys, you know may have it with me. You may have it with other traders where you're like ah shoot you know Russ made $10,000 Say you know I only made a hundred bucks This is.

this is embarrassing and you know what? You lose sight of the fact that that hundred dollars for you. It's great. That's a hundred dollars more than you had two hours ago. You know if your daily goal is 200 bucks and you only made a hundred, you know.

Okay so so you're a little below the daily goal but every day you're finishing in the green you are a hero. You are part of the 10% who have figured it out and you don't want to beat yourself up for them because then what you could end up doing is being like unsatisfied with the hundred dollars and then taking trade number three or number four and losing 200 and now you're in the red and now you're part of the 90 percent right? and that lives money And it's because you gave in to emotion. So that's kind of the thing that I started to think about I was like you know man at the end of the day you're gonna be sitting here by yourself and at that point you know I was like newly divorced and I was just like this is I Part of the reason that I got divorced was because I had invested all of my time and energy into trying to learn how to day trade and I wasn't making money and we were falling into debt and she wasn't happy with those choices I was making. And as you know, she probably would have been happier if I had worked at a you know gas station and just had a regular job.

So you know. but I was I was determined and I refused to give up. So you know that determination ended up paying off. It just took a little longer than I thought.

So you know I was like at the end of the day, you're sitting here and it doesn't matter that you know whoever out there made more money than you. they're not paying your bills, they don't have your cost of living. You know they don't, they're not you. You've got to focus on yourself.

and two hundred dollars a day might not sound like a lot on a day where I make 20 grand. but 200 days, $50,000 a year? that's two times the average household income here in Italy That's right on par with the average household income in the United States And if you're doing that consistently, you know with one hour a day, you of course have room to freelance to build a business to do other things in the rest of your day. You know that's kind of what I ended up doing with warrior training. so you know you've got so much opportunity when you find when you learn this skill that can give you an income in just a couple hours a day and you really have an incredible you can have an incredible life in front of you.

So let's talk about the two phases of learning the trade. Two phases, strategy development and then live trading. a proven strategy. Strategy development.

How do you develop a strategy? Well, here's the kind of funny thing about the market. There's really only a handful of ways to profitably Drey The market. I Mean on the one hand, you could say that there's for every trader, there's a strategy because everyone's strategy is slightly different and I suppose that's true, But on the other hand, you know you either focus on the long side or you focus on the short side and you either focus on penny stocks and low priced stocks kind of the way I do. or you focus on blue chip stocks like Facebook Netflix Apple and that's within the stock market.

You know, if you trade futures, are you trade full? Forex You know, Obviously, there's gonna be strategies within those those securities. But but in terms of day trading stocks, there's really only a handful of strategies. So there's sort of two ways you can go about lowering a trade Number One is you try to reinvent the wheel. which is you know you start from nothing.

No knowledge of the market, no knowledge of you know really anything is it comes to trading strategies and you just start testing out different things. You know, you watch some YouTube videos you you know, kind of just play around, see what works and that's essentially what I did and it ended up taking me more than two years before I was consistently profitable. All right. So two years to become consistently profitable and when I finally developed a strategy, well, it was kind of like kind of like getting lost in Italy you know I drove around in circles for four hours only to end up, you know.

Oh, this is where I was trying to get to and so where everyone is there was a shortcut I just didn't know about it because we're all trying to get to the same place. Profit betrayed and proven strategy. and again, there's there's deviations in strategies. Some are gonna be harder than others, so we're gonna be easier than others.

I've tried to make mine as easy as possible and that was mostly because you know I had to teach it myself, learn it myself, and I've tried to make it easy for my students who are at the beginning of their learning curve as well. So that's why we trade stocks and not options and try not to get into complex stuff. But in any case, I took that long path. And so during those two years of trading, what I was essentially doing was creating my own historical data set.

and so in that that month of August when I had that, I had a big loss. first week, the month of August and I was below the PDT level and so I ended up having to go back and you know, sit for a while just reviewing my trades to couldn't trade. So I was like might as well just recommend trades and I hate because I've been trading for a couple years. I had a whole lot of trading data and I was able to sort the trades from biggest winner to biggest loser and that's when I discovered for me the secret, which was that the stocks I made the most money on were the ones that were up more than 20 to 30 percent on the day and might not sound like a lot, but once I focused in on those stocks, you know that was me starting to get pointed in the right direction from there.

I just continue to refine on you know which price range I did the best on and you know, get tighter and tighter until I had a profitable strategy. but it took two years of active trading and losing money developing all that historical data before I I had something that I could go through and really discover. fine. let's for a human.

so strategy development is where the ninety percent traders who fail drop off. they drop off during strategy development. Not necessarily because they go bankrupt, but They give up. They simply can't afford to keep you know, messing around in the market, not making money.

They can't justify spending their time. You know, doing this every day. if it's not working I Mean you can do. You can justify for a period of time, but eventually you know you're just like I can't I can't justify this anymore.

And and so they they drop off and of course some will have a big loss like what I had that knocks them below. You know, account minimums and they're just like, alright, that's it and they can't mentally recover. hey sorry my, my battery died. So anyways, we were talking about the two phases of trading strategy development and then live trading.

A proven strategy. So live trading a proven strategy. Generally you think? Okay, that's the easy part. and it is.

You know, Day trading Every single day. That's the fun part. making money consistently and saw about averages. You know, obviously even the best traders will have read days, but as long as you know you're averaging green, then at the end of the year, you're profitable.

The challenge during a phase to live trading a proven strategy comes with the fact that there will inevitably be a time where you have a much larger loss than you had accounted for or had planned for. you know, and it could be any number of factors that that lead to or result in that happening. But it's it's something that can happen. So what's really going to define you is how you react or respond to those big red days.

For me, what I've discovered is ultimately the the biggest challenge is maintaining emotional composure, not allowing myself to get impulsive, aggressive, overly aggressive at the wrong time. So these are a couple of tips that have helped me get better at maintaining emotional composure. The first is exercise and let's think about this for a second. So exercise for me in the traditional sense of like going to the gym is not something I enjoy doing.

It's not a lot of fun I don't look forward to it. It's something that I only do really because I believe that it helps me with my discipline as a trainer. So for me because going to the gym is not fun, what I'm forcing myself to do is experience discomfort and just sit through it. That is my way of exercising that muscle of self-control but forcing myself to do something I don't really want to do just like when I have just taken a $5,000 loss and my instinct which is our natural instincts as human beings causes to lose money as traders.

That's why I We are not built to be successful traders. otherwise everyone would be successful. We have to override our natural instincts in order to find a consistent profitability. So just like that I have to fight that urge to double down and go super aggressive on the next trade to try to compensate for a loss.

you know? I've got to force myself to go through my exercises freshmen. So number one, exercise number two and I wouldn't have expected this in the world of finance and you know, day trading. Of course, there's some traders out there making millions of dollars a year trading meditation. Now the benefit of meditation for me is that forcing myself to sit and think about nothing but my breathing.

Very uncomfortable I Don't enjoy doing that. That's enough. It's not fun I force myself to do it as a as a means of exercising that muscle of self-control And the third, and this is an interesting one that I've just sort of started playing is acupuncture. Again, an acupuncture having little needles stuck into your arms and back and face and legs.

Everything to me is just personal for me for me is not enjoyable I don't I don't enjoy the sensation now at the end of the session I feel good and I feel you know like that was that's not glanced over for freely really and and so for me. it's another one of those things where my my acupuncturist he he puts the needles in and then then he leaves the room sometimes for 20-30 minutes. and so there was one time where he put them in and a couple of them were in a little deep or they were like on a nerve and they were just. it was like excruciating and I was laying there and I was like I was like what if he doesn't come back well what did he do where'd he go get a sandwich? did you go move his car? did he go run into someone have a little conversation where the hell is he? What's going on here this is I need some help and I was just getting more and more annoyed as I'm laying there and I was like can I even get these out myself and as I move my arm you know they all kind of adjust and I'm like oh god I can't and then I'm thinking what if there's you know what if he you know what if he he forgot about me, what if he just disappears and then then what am I gonna do and and then I said you know what surrender just give up surrender to the flow and a quote from a song but probably a lot of people have said it as well.

and literally like five seconds after I said surrender the door opens and he comes in. It's like you say but that was the that was the lesson and and so the discomfort that I feel in trading pales in comparison to that. Those of you who have had tattoos you know you kind of, you get it as well. It's you, just just sit through it, you grin bare and it's not for most of us.

I Don't think it's a lot of fun, but you do it. You get through it and you know at the end of it. If you do it enough, you start to develop a system of just going with it, just letting it happen. And that's exactly what you need in order to be a successful trader.

Because losses will happen. You will have days where you take big losses as much as we try to avoid them. You know it's like being a boxer and trying to not get punched. I'm not gonna hit in the face.

You know, good luck trying. It's gonna happen sooner or later. and you got to know how to take a hit. And what defines you as a trader and as a boxer's how you respond to that, How you're able to, you know, take it and not get rattled, not get thrown off your game.

I Had a real challenge myself during during this year where I was working on this million dollar goal to take the $583 account less than 600 bucks and turn it into a million dollars of profit which is crazy. No one's ever done that before. and on the day that I was at 992 thousand dollars and I was up 2500 on the day I said to myself, this is going to be the day This is the day that I'm gonna cross the million dollar mark I it's like I made it I was like it has to be today and and so and and you know this is it's personal. but that day that was the anniversary of the day that my father passed away and I think I wanted to just do this sort of in his memory and maybe maybe help replace a very sad memory with a happy memory.

and I certainly should have known that all of the emotions around that day would not allow me to be in my best state of mind as a trainer. And yet just like when I got off the airplane after traveling for you know, 20 hours or whatever it was and I sat down to trade, I overestimated that I was fine and I've got this and I was up two thousand dollars. saw trade that looked like a pretty easy you know when pretty easily set up jumped in, it didn't work out right away I was I was in the red down quite a bit and I was like you know what I'm gonna buy more shares but I rarely do that, almost never do that I said yeah I'm just gonna buy more shares, bought more shares, it drops more, comes back up I buy even more shares and now I'm in this stock with one of the biggest positions. I've taken a couple of years and it ends up flushing down and just stopping me out with a $28,000 loss.

second worst day of my career and I had to spend the next six weeks. Well, I continued I the next day in the next week I lost a little bit more money, another like 10 or 15 thousand market ended up kind of just being crappy and I ended up spending the next like six weeks or almost two months getting myself back up to that million dollar level. And you know that was just another big reminder from the market that doesn't matter what day it is, doesn't matter how much you want to be green today the market. it's either gonna give you opportunities or it won't and you have to trade the market you are in right now today, not the market that you want to be in What? I Love today? Friday To make 40 50 thousand dollars and have it to be the best day of my trading career, You better believe it.

of course I would. Who wouldn't But I can't be swinging for the fences like that's gonna happen or like that's a realistic expectation because when you start doing that well, you know you're You're starting to do something more like gamble. And that's not what leads to long-term success. So if your twos, your two phases of trading strategy development that took me two years cost me.

My marriage cost me over a hundred thousand dollars in losses and cost of living and I almost gave up. I was really close to giving up before I finally turn the corner and then phase two is live trading a proven strategy and even during phase two, there have been times where I've been close to the edge of just being like I can't I can't even you know you just can't How am I ever gonna? You know? Face the YouTube audience with my $30,000 red day. this is humiliating. This is just so frustrating.

Markets terrible. but step back focused I do the things I know, help me exercise meditation and acupuncture I was like a porcupine at the end of my thirty thousand dollar red day. It's just like give me every needle you've got but as part of the it's part of a life and then of course the benefit is that I became a self-made millionaire thanks to day trading that you know Here I am in Italy one of the you know most beautiful countries and places of the country probably and I'm gonna trade today for about an hour I might make a couple thousand dollars I might lose money but this career has allowed me to be able to pretty much live life on my own terms. Yesterday was the fourth of July and I came into the market to be a day trader because I wanted independence I did not want to ever have a nine-to-five job again and it's now been more than ten years since I have a nine-to-five job I'm not looking back I'm just gonna keep growing as a trader, keep getting better and try to keep helping new guys who are at the very beginning of your journey get through strategy development as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

And that's why we've created all the classes that we have before. You're trading the warrior starter class, the warrior pro course. It's all about equipping you with tools to become a successful trader. It's putting the templates for my strategies right in front of you so you can hit the ground running.

Because like I said, pretty much all traders fall into you know, one of a couple of different camps of trading strategies and you know it's like climbing. Mount Everest You got a couple different routes to get up there, but you know ultimately we're all trying to get to the same place which is to be a profitable trader and got ourselves a little bus situation. So and a big part of getting through strategy development is finding finding the right guy. Finding the right team shirt inspires who gets excited about what you doing to help you find the path up to the top.

So leave some comments below leaving some questions I'll come through and answer them. We'll get this video uploaded as quick as we can but might not be uploaded for a couple weeks. might not be until I Get back I Don't know, we'll see what the upload speeds are like here. All right everyone, thanks for hanging out with me on this episode driving Ross and I will see you guys all soon! Oh hey I didn't see you there while I was just working on the dream board for my next home run trade.

Hopefully it comes soon. Until then, make sure you subscribe to get email alerts anytime! I Go live or upload new videos. Until then, happy surfing!.