What's up, everyone? All right? So I'm here in Miami and we're finishing up our Air Circle seminar and one of the things that was really interesting about this seminar. We get together a group of traders who have all graduated from the Warrior Pro course and we talk about what's working, what's not working. and four of the traders that were here are also semi-professional poker players and one of them came up to me and was talking to me about what he sees as some of the similarities, some of the things that he's learned playing poker that have really helped him be a more successful day trader, being more mindful of risk and strategy and things like that. and I've always hesitated to really talk about day trading and gambling in the same sentence only because I don't think what I do is is gambling and I don't like to think of day trading as a game as gambling.

And yet there are some similarities. There are people who gamble with their trading accounts, and then there are people who consistently make money just like when you go to Vegas There are people who consistently make money at the casino. and then there's everyone else who lose money. So what is the common thread there that ties? sort of? Those who are successful at these risk related.

You know potential careers, whether it's trading or you know professional poker. That's we're going to talk about during this episode. and as always I hope you guys have questions and comments. You leave them right down below and do not already subscribe the channel subscribe and you'll get an alert the next time I Upload a new episode.

So let's talk just for a quick second about the definition of gambling. So I looked it up on my phone a little while ago and gambling is defined as placing bets on games of chance in the hopes of monetary or material result, in hopes of winning money. or you know, an object. All right.

So so that that's straightforward enough by that nature. I Would say that even though they say gambling is in one definition, was placing a bet on the outcome of something that is unknown. Certainly, when you take a trade, the outcome is initially unknown. like placing a bet on a sporting event, the outcome is unknown.

You won't know whether it you know is going to be a successful bet or trade until the stock is played itself out or until the event has happened. Having said that, I Think to me the part that just does not speak the day trading at least the way I do it is the aspect of hope. There is no real element of hope as part of my strategy. Sure, I can be always hopeful that my trades work out and then I make money and stuff like that.

but I don't base my strategy. So right away, the biggest difference there is that gambling is hope based and trading well. training can be hoped based also. But trading if you're successful, it is not based on hope.

It's based on confidence in a strategy that is proven profitable like a semi professional poker player. I would say that there. they're really not basing it as much on hope either. They would be basing the expected outcome much more on a strategy and a set of rules of how they play the game.

But let's talk a little bit more. Maybe about the similarities. Blood will come into the market today. train are doing it in such a speculative way.

In other words, they don't have a strategy. You know that means it means that their success is 100% based on luck. You can't build a career on luck and I'd say well, that's gambling right now. Why would someone do that well I Think it speaks to the fact that just like going to a casino, you hear about people who go to the casino and well, you make a lot of money and so I suppose betrayed.

It's the same thing people heard of a traitor who made a lot of money and so hey, I'm gonna give it a shot and I'm gonna hope it works out. That's not how it resolves for most people. In order to be successful, you need to have a strategy. You need to do things differently from what everyone else is doing.

They say the majority day traders lose money and the reality is the majority of people that go to casinos also lose money but at least at the casino you get to play some games, have a little fun, you might get your drinks paid for, and you get a discount the next time you come back. Even if you lost money when you're day trading, well, there's not a lot of perks. and being a day trader who loses money, maybe you'll get a Christmas card from your broker, but that's not gonna be enough to keep you coming back into the market. As a day trader, we need to be making money consistently.

It's as simple as that. A really tough question that my trading coach used to ask me is Ross were you gambling today or were you trading? You would usually ask me that after I had a particularly bad loss because he knew that most the time I had a really big loss I was trading outside my strategy aka gambling So you might ask, why would a day trader ever break the strategy? why would you ever go outside the strategy? The answer to that question lies within the wrestle that we have between our logical and intellectual mind and our emotional and impulsive mind upon having a big loss. Whether it's a trading loss or a bad hand in poker, a bad game of poker, the initial feeling can be a feeling of frustration, the feeling of anger, and that's all emotion. Now, as those emotions start to pick up, the more that they pick up, the more likely you are to make emotionally impulsive decisions.

emotionally fueled decisions where you're allowing yourself to act on the emotion, where you really should, maybe step back and walk away. Instead, you get aggressive, you try to double down, go back and revenge, trade, or make back everything you lost in the next hand. And that can start a really dangerous cycle of snowballing. And that's why it's so important to have risk parameters in place.

So when you get to that point where you're about to fall off the wagon or you're about to go rogue, you've got something in place to stop you. That's why it's so important that every strategy the first component of every strategy, whether it's a trading strategy or a strategy for how you play poker, is a risk management. How you're going to mitigate risk, mitigate drawdown so you never have a day that's a big blowout. Now, In order to prevent those big blowout days, some of the semi professional poker players that are now students, they told me that one of their techniques is that they go into the casino only with cash and their license.

So they go in with the amount of cash and they're willing to put on the table to potentially lose. And if they lose it, then the only way they can get more cash would be to walk home and then you know to take out cash from the ATM machine or something like that. So by the time they've gotten home, obviously the emotions of the frustration everything else have come back down and then they're not as likely to act on that emotional impulse. The reality is, it is only human to have that impulse and that's why we need those parameters in place to stop us from doing what is so instinctual for us to revenge trade to get aggressive.

So as a trader, what I do to manage risk is I set parameters on my account that if my account is ever down more than $1,000 that's my max loss right now. But I'm done trading and I literally cannot take any more trades for the rest of the day. And so I effectively done is I've capped my max loss and that's really important. That's that thing that I need.

So if I ever worry about maybe losing self-control that max loss is already set now as part of my strategy I have a very specific set of criteria in order for me to take a trade. And if I don't see that criteria I don't trade just like a poker player would have a very specific set of cards in their hand in order to be willing to keep going. You know, if I don't see that equality set up, there's no reason for me to trade I know when I see that set up? my accuracy on it is 70% So I can do really well. but if I don't see it, there's no use in trading and I've just got to sit on the sidelines.

Now that is all part of my strategy. So those of you guys who are wondering more about the details of my strategy: how I manage risk really on a trade by trade basis In terms of where I set my max loss, how I find strong stocks to trade each day and where I get in, where I get out. Check out the link right in the description. I'll put a link right there where you can register to my next day trading 101 class.

So I don't base my strategy on hope I base my strategy on statistics historical data. In fact, I've got over 4,000 trades of historical data and that's what leads me to believe that I will be right 70 percent of time. As long as I have the discipline to trade, the strategy that I know is my quality set up. That's one of the hardest things about being a trader and I'm sure one of the hardest things about being a poker player is having the discipline to sit on the sidelines watching trades go by, watching hands go by.

But if they don't fit within your criteria within your strategy of being a quality of being worth taking the risk on that you exercise the strength and the discipline to just sit on the sidelines. that is the hardest part. I Have met so many beginner traders who's just they start jumping on everything that moves and what inevitably ends up happening is they lower their quality threshold and they end up losing money. So one of the poker players that I was talking to during the inner circle, he said that the way you spot the new poker players, you spot the ones that are getting on every single hand and he said it's just it's so obvious you will take their money.

Now you want to be part of the 10% who are successful and presumably if you're watching this video. it's in trading and that really means having the discipline to sit on the sidelines even if you only trade twice a week, three times a week, four times a week. If you're trading the best quality setups and your accuracy is 70% you will be profitable. That's the path to profitability.

Starts with a strategy and continues and ends with discipline. All right, it's a new day, but same topic, trading and gambling. Now here's the thing. If you want to gamble with your day trading account, you totally can.

And you can totally go to a casino and gamble. If you want to go and gamble and play on some of the tables, no one's gonna stop you. You can do that, but in both of those scenarios, you're gonna consistently lose money. You may have a few lucky wins, but that's not going to create insistent income, which means your success would be based entirely on luck, not on having a actual strategy that's consistent and proven.

Thank you! So here's the fun thing about this: It's not enough to be disciplined Fifty percent of time time, 70% time. you've got to be disciplined 100% of because. imagine this: you follow all the rules during the first hour of the day and then during the rest of it you have zero discipline to break all the rules. When you're essentially gambling, the end result of being disciplined only 50% of the time is losing money.

It's the same result as as gambling, and that is one of the biggest challenges, certainly both with training In with playing poker, you know, if you're at the table and you follow all the rules for the first several hands, and at the end, you throw those rules out the window. the rules of your strategy, the result is losing money. So with discipline, you've got to exercise that muscle. So when you're trading during the hours that you're in front of the computer, you can be one in the rules.

How many of you guys can relate to that experience As a trader of having followed the rules all day long only on that last trade to get frustrated was a little bit of money and then just go completely off the rails. So why is that happen? The emotional mind takes over, discipline is gone, and mistakes happen. Ultimately, your ability to make day trading a long term career depends on you being able to have the discipline to follow the rules of your strategy. It's as simple as that.

Now, in terms of finding the strategy, that's kind of the easy part. You guys can check out the link right below in the description and watch Day Trading 101. That's where I break down my strategy for you guys so you can see my rules for where I get in, where I get out, how I find strong stocks to trade and how I manage my risk. The hard part comes with having the discipline to follow the rules of the strategy.

Now I Want to be really clear: the reason that discipline is so hard as an independent trader is because no one is going to hold you accountable for following the rules except for you. You have to be the one to hold yourself accountable if you decide to break the rules. So what you know, who do you get in trouble with you? You have to be the one that says I'm following the rules today I'm following the rules every day because any lapse or rule following can result in what could potentially be a catastrophic now. when I was getting started, I was terrible at holding myself accountable and in fact, I didn't really start seriously holding myself accountable to following the rules until I have lost so much money trading that I literally couldn't afford and had anymore money to my account.

and so if I didn't follow the rules on that kind of last attempt, that would be me. But it worked. You know the stakes were high, so you know Mike Kind of thought it's like how do you simulate that experience of this has to work for someone that maybe you have an account with enough money that you could take a couple of really big losses. If you don't need to hold yourself accountable, maybe you're trading a retirement account and thinking well, I can hold on to this I've got time a pack, it's a retirement account I can't trade or I can't take any the money out of it.

Tell them you know 70 years old, just hold it and that's not trading that's turning a strategy and you know need to help. So I'm a big advocate of trading in a small account even if you can afford a big account because when you trade with a small account, you really have to follow the rules. otherwise you know you can blow it up and then you can't trade for a few days. you got to add more money in and it only takes doing that a few times before.

you're like, all right. I got a I got a tighten up the rules and I got to hold myself accountable. There's an expression called fake it til you make it and I think In the realm of day trading or professional poker playing, that means adopting the mindset, the behavior, and the strategy of those who are successful, knowing that if you do all that, your own success isn't far behind. So when you meet a trader who's been trading successfully and making money for a long period of time, or you meet someone who goes to Vegas and plays poker and makes money.

They're not gambling and that's not based on luck. their success. It's based on having a strategy. So the question for you is do you think you have what it takes to be part of the 10% to be one of the ones who is a successful trader who was a master of managing risk who's able to walk that tightrope every single day, maintaining discipline, staying cool, calm and collected, and coming out on top.

If you think you have what it takes, check out some of the links in my description. I Think you'll really enjoy them. Day Trading 101 Lots of other links with info and how to get start trading and I Hope to see you guys in Cairo Alright, that's it for me. Girls Misty, Would you be a trader or a gambler girl? What would you do? Would you be a good trader? Would you just gamble? Give all your kibble? Would you gamble The kibble for baby? Maybe more kibble Kibble payday? More about trading.

Check out some of the links in my description and if you have questions, ask them in the comments I Personally respond to every question posted on my channel and don't forget to subscribe.