[00:00] Unfortunately, I think you are learning trading backwards. When I first started trading, I thought the entire point of trading was figuring out when to buy and when to sell. That's it. Find the right indicator, find the right strategy,
[00:14] find the right candlestick pattern, and some combination of things on a chart that tells me buy here, sell here, make money. And I think almost everybody who gets into trading starts in exactly the same place.
[00:27] Because if you go on YouTube right now and search for trading strategies, there are millions of videos teaching you exactly that. I've personally made a lot of them. Moving averages, RSI, Fibonacci, support and resistance, divergence, scalping strategies.
[00:44] And I'm not saying those things don't work. I still use some of them. But after doing this for years, I started to think that people were teaching trading completely backwards. because the first thing everybody wants to learn is probably one of the last things they should be worrying about.
[01:01] And I wish somebody had explained this to me when I started because it would have saved me a ridiculous amount of time. Think about what happens when somebody discovers trading. Usually they see somebody making money.
[01:13] Maybe they see a guy that takes a trade and made $2,000. And immediately the question becomes, what strategy is he using? So you find the strategy, maybe it's RSI divergences, maybe it's a moving average crossover, whatever.
[01:28] You put it up on your chart, you see a setup, you take a trade, and you lose. Okay, maybe that strategy sucks, so you find another one. And now you're using Fibonacci, you lose again.
[01:40] Okay, maybe Fibonacci needs some sort of confirmation. So now you have RSI and Fibonacci. Then somebody tells you that you need market structure. So now you've got RSI, Fibonacci, and market structure.
[01:54] And then you discover order blocks, liquidity, fair value gaps, even volume profiles. Suddenly your chart looks like the cockpit of an airplane. And somehow, you're still losing money.
[02:07] So you assume you just haven't found the right thing yet. And that the trap Because you trying to solve the wrong problem Here something that took me a long time to understand You can actually have a profitable trading strategy and still lose money
[02:22] trading it. And that sounds ridiculous, but imagine I give you a strategy right now that wins 40% of the time. But when it wins, you make twice as much as what you lose. That's potentially a profitable
[02:36] system. Now you take the first trade, a loss. Second trade, loss. Third trade, loss. Fourth trade, loss. What do most traders do at this point? They don't say this is perfectly normal statistical
[02:50] variance. They say this strategy doesn't work and they change something. Maybe they add another indicator. Maybe they change their settings. Maybe they move their stop loss. Maybe they double the
[03:03] position because they want their money back. Then trade number five, if you would have kept everything the same, would have been a winner, except now they're trading a completely different system. That is why I think the strategy itself is pretty far down the list from the things that
[03:18] you need to learn. Because before you can make money from a strategy, you have to learn how to survive the strategy. If I had to teach somebody trading today from day zero, the first thing I would teach them wouldn't be how to enter a trade. I'd teach them how to lose one. Seriously. I'd give
[03:37] them $10,000 of imaginary money on a demo account and say, you're going to lose this trade. How much are you willing to lose? Because that's trading. Nobody knows what the next candle is going to do.
[03:49] You can have an amazing setup. Everything can line up perfectly and you can still lose. So if one losing trade can seriously damage your account, nothing else matters. Your Fibonacci doesn't
[04:02] matter. Your RSI doesn't matter. Your win rate doesn't even matter. Because eventually you're going to hit the trade that destroys you. So the first skill isn't finding a winner. It's making sure a loser doesn't really matter very much. Think about a table covered in $10,001 bills.
[04:19] And you're looking at it like, yeah, this is my money. And I like sneaked up and grabbed a dollar. and you're still looking at your pile of cash, would you even notice that that gone That proper risk management And it boring which is probably why nobody wants to learn it first Then I would teach them something else that beginners almost never think about
[04:41] Not every day is a trading day. This one took me a really long time because when you're new, you open up the charts and immediately you start looking for a trade. And if you stare at the chart long enough, you'll find one. Trust me. You'll convince yourself that something is there.
[04:56] You've drawn this to the non-achievement level, you've found some divergence, you've found some support, you've found an order block. Whatever you need to justify clicking the button. But experienced traders start asking a completely different question.
[05:08] Not, where is my trade, but should I even be trading this? That's a massive difference. Because the exact same strategy can behave completely differently depending on what's happening in the market.
[05:20] A beautiful trend following setup in a trending market can look incredible. Put that exact same setup into a horrible sideways price action, and it gets chopped to pieces. You could enter 15 trades just getting out of the sideways movement.
[05:34] The strategy didn't suddenly become stupid. The environment changed. And this is one of the hardest things to code into a trading system. Because humans are actually pretty good at looking at the chart and saying,
[05:46] this looks like garbage. A computer doesn't necessarily see it visually like you do. They just see numbers. It sees rules. If the rules are true, then it takes the trade. And that realization has come
[05:58] up repeatedly when I started turning my own trading ideas into indicators and bots. The computer would do exactly what I told it to do, and I'd look at the trade and think, I would never take that trade. That's when you start realizing how much of your trading isn't
[06:13] actually the entry. It's everything that's happening around the entry. Then we get to the thing everybody wanted to learn in the first place, the strategy, the entry, the setup, and don't misunderstand me. You obviously need one. You can't just randomly buy and sell and
[06:27] call risk management your strategy. You need some reason to believe that over a large enough number of trades, what you're doing actually has an edge. But I think people massively overestimate how good that edge needs to be. They're looking at 80% win rates, 90% win rates, no losing trades,
[06:43] perfect entry with no drawdown And I don think that what you need You need something that has a small repeatable advantage and then you need to stop yourself from destroying that advantage That the part
[06:55] that nobody wants to hear, because finding a secret indicator sounds exciting. Doing the same boring thing a hundred times doesn't, but I think that's much closer to what profitable trading actually looks like. And then there's one final thing that I would teach, probably the hardest
[07:09] one, and that's to do nothing. You can learn a strategy in an afternoon. You can learn basic risk management in an afternoon. But learning to sit there, see something that almost looks like your setup and not touch it, that takes practice, years of discipline. Because trading creates this
[07:27] weird feeling that if you're not in the market, you're missing something. It's called FOMO, fear of missing out. You see Euro USD moving. Bitcoin starts ripping up. Gold suddenly takes
[07:40] off. And you think, I should be in this. But why? Because the market is moving? That is not a strategy. Sometimes the best decision you make all day is closing TradingView and going outside,
[07:52] doing other chores to fill up your time. And there's no screenshot of that trade. There's nothing to post on Instagram. There's no profit number. But you also didn't lose anything. So if I could go back and teach myself trading again, I would literally reverse the order. I wouldn't
[08:08] start with strategy, entry, money. I'd start with survival, risk, then understanding losses, then understanding market conditions, then patience, then execution. And then I'd worry
[08:22] about finding a strategy. Because once you understand all of those things, the strategy doesn't need to perform miracles. It just needs to give you a slight advantage. And I think that's the thing I misunderstood for years. I thought professional trading meant becoming incredibly
[08:37] good at predicting what the market was going to do. Now I think it's almost the opposite. It's accepting that you don't know what the market is going to do and building a process that still
[08:49] works anyway. So maybe the reason you've been jumping from strategy to strategy isn't because you haven't found the right one yet. Maybe you just learned trading backwards. If you guys enjoyed
[09:01] this video, please share it with your friends. Thank you so much for watching, and we will see you in the next one.