The Zone
You might have heard athletes refer to ‘being in the zone’, where the baseball player can see the stitches on the baseball as that 100 mph ball comes screaming at them, or the golfer who effortlessly drives the ball on the green with ease, round after round. In trading, you too can get in the zone, however it requires a simple task, you have to actually trade. I don't mean hyper active, day trading every stock you see uptick. I mean focusing on your strategy, finding your A+ set ups and swinging the bat when that meatball pitch slowly comes across the plate. When you do this consistently you too, like the professionals can get on a hot streak which we will talk about later. For now let's cover a few major points required to getting into the zone.
Commit yourself to excellence - You must want to be the best, plain and simple. Being good enough to get by is not going to hack it when it comes to investing. People who want to get in the zone crave coaching, mentoring and strive to improve daily. They want to learn more, they look for tougher competitors since there are no easy ways to be the best.
Work hard - To become better you must be willing to put in the time and energy necessary to improve. Throwing money at the fanciest computer or platform is going to do nothing for you when the other guy is spending his money trading and learning and less time on the fluff that does not matter. If you are not looking to improve daily just close up shop now or risk handing your money to the traders who are better prepared.
“Spending too much time on hardware or software tends to be counter productive.”
Practice Perfect - If you are making it up on the fly you are only practicing bad habits. We cannot begin to count how many times we have came across traders who have blown up their accounts, and when we ask who taught them, they tell us they taught themselves. Did you teach yourself how to read, how to drive a car, how to play a sport? Unless you’re a prodigy you probably had some guidance along the way. Learn it the right way once instead of wasting years forming bad habits on made up ideas. Just because Carl Icahn made his billions shorting, don't think that you too are going to replicate the same success just because someone else has done it.
Strategy without tactics is a slow route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Confidence - Without it you will not be in the game for long, your mental capital is what separates you from the pretenders and the pros. Now there is a difference between cocky and confident, cocky traders get humbled by confident traders all day long. A cocky trader is quick to become fearful in silence, a confident trader can easily admit when he is wrong and get out of a trade. Just think of all the Bitcoin gurus claiming it was going to $100,000 at $18,000 yet after a 70% haircut they’re back to driving for Uber and talking about the good ole days (you know that 6 month period where 99% of people never sold on the way up of the bubble and held it back below their price).
When you’re in the zone, you make the rules, when you aren't you follow the rules.
Concentrate - Was Michael Jordan the best at baseball, soccer, football and basketball? No, he was a master at one sport, he is extremely competitive so he can still compete in other fields however he is a master of one. The cocky new trader wants to be the MJ of everything. I was once chatting with a cocky brash new trader, when asking him what he trades I still remember his reply to this day:
“I trade stocks, options, futures, binary options, forex, currencies (same thing), penny stocks, crypto and I use an algo to base my trades!”
After that insane response, he later admitted that he has yet to net $1 from trading (has only lost money), we were not surprised in the least. Even for us, we master one trade and exploit it, tweak it, enhance it and adapt it to new market conditions. We concentrate on the task at hand, making money. We don't care which new fad is popping up because there is a new one every year. 2017 was Bitcoin and all the other copycat coins that came out, 2015 and 2016 were the years of forex, 2013 and 2014 was the binary options craze, before that it was penny stocks and oil and gold names, we could go on and on. Every year dumb money gets sucked up into a new bubble and the majority of them lose their shirt and repeat the process over and over chasing the next fad as if this time it's going to be different (it never is).
“How people play the game shows something of their character, how they lose shows it all.”
Conditioning - You think that guy with the 6 pack goes to the gym once in a blue moon? Or that Tom Brady just strolls into practice when he feels like it? Fuck no, those guys are relentlessly conditioning themselves day in and day out. If you are looking at 1,000 charts and day and the other guys are looking at a dozen charts, who is going to find more opportunities?
Pressure - Recently, after a wild start to 2018 we saw our first correction in 2 years, now for the last 2 years we were on an absolutely nutty rally. Most people who were still on the sidelines had the excuse that they were “waiting for a correction” those people waited 2 years, missed a broad based rally of over 55% for the correction that lasted for a drum roll please, two fucking hours. The last correction (10% drop from the recent high) lasted 2 goddamn hours. All these people who boasted they would get in during a correction had a mere 2 hours to buy all the stock they said they were going to. Fun fact, during that time, those same people’s new excuse was “the market is crashing, I will wait until it settles” (meaning when it's back at highs, yet then it will be too expensive).
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If you do not want to trade or invest that's fine, there are over 100,000+ financial advisors in the United States and we are one as well. While most shit their pants during the rocky times, we look forward to it. During these times a stock can do a year’s worth of price movement in weeks. You might have to sit in Apple for 6 months to a year to make 20% yet when things get wild you can make those same returns in weeks if you have a plan (and balls).
(Click on the image for a larger chart)
As you can see when people get scared and hide from the market, the best opportunities arise, what would have taken 5 months if you traded Apple perfectly during the slow times could have been done in less than a month when most were shitting their pants.
“Success has no rules, however you can learn a lot from failure.”
Love what you do - We know you have heard this corny saying a thousand times however it's true. We are pumped for Mondays (TGIM) as it’s our favorite day of the week, if you do not love what you do or when it comes to trading, love to learn from your mistakes when you are wrong, trading might not be for you. If you are up for the challenge then it's a game that will keep you on your toes.
Do you have balls?
In the Group Chat explain 4 key points that are needed to be able to stay in the zone and what you will start to do daily as a result to aim to get into the zone?