welcome back everyone this is the final video in the high performance trading series and this is where I'm going to give you some strategies you can use to improve your trading decisionmaking to help you stick to your rules and see better results I say repeatedly in my videos that discipline is not required for trading and that's true if you need discipline while you're watching the market and engaging in opening or managing trades you're doing something wrong trading should be effortless and easy however profitable trading has very little to do with your time in the market
what separates winning Traders from losing Traders is the work they do outside of the market we all know who Yen bolt is the world record holder 100 meter Sprinter AR his Peak when training for competition he used to physically train for 20 hours per week and you might think he did a lot of sprinting he didn't 85% of the time was spent in the gym lifting weights for the short amount of time he was on a running track most of it was working on technique like accelerating out of the blocks it's estimated he did only
around 2 minutes of actual 100 met sprinting per week for the best Sprinter of all time he did very little sprinting sprinting was almost just a byproduct of the skill development work that he did and trading is the same it's the work you put into your training outside of the markets that determined whether or not you'll make money when in the markets and for that discipline is required we all want a quick fix usually from a system or an indicator that will transform our results overnight it isn't going to happen the 1% of traders who
succeed and make money putting the hours and the miles in the less glamorous areas that no one else is interested in there's a saying that's worth remembering today I will do what others won't so tomorrow I can do what others can't so let's jump in I'll start with some basic tips that can be implemented immediately to give you some faster results and then I'll go into the more detailed strategies that have a much bigger impact and will give better results but that also require a bit more time and effort there are nine strategies in total
so first off we'll look at some really simple physical aspects to improve your brain function and power which may surprise you your brain accounts for only 2% of your body weight but it consumes 20% of your total calorie expenditure 25% of the oxygen you use 25% of the nutrients and 70% of the glucose energy that you bur it's extremely demanding and resource intensive so it's a good idea that we take care of it and it's 85% water when you're just 1% dehydrated you suffer a 5% drop in cognitive functions a 2% dehydration leads to short-term
memory depletion problems of focusing trouble making basic matth calculations and it exaggerates depression and anger prolonged dehydration even causes your brain cells to shrink so a simple and immediate fix is to ensure you drink plenty of water before you trade and keep a glass of water on your desk as you trade you will make worse trading decisions when you're dehydrated even slightly and better decisions when you are fully hydrated the next thing is food now I'm not going to preach I'm just going to give you the facts this is how sugar and being an overweight
impacts brain function it causes increased oxidative stress in the brain from free radicals that causes brain tissue injury brain areas which control impulsive behavior can shrink making you more impulsive other brain areas which control willpower and self-control also shrink and can even die completely which means you will have less self-control the hippocampus which is critical for memory shrinks for every two point increase in body mass index the hippocampus shrinks by 7% giving you a poorer memory refined sugars trigger an immune response which in turn causes cognitive deficits that mimic the effects of Alzheimer's disease high
blood sugar when you are performing a mentally challenging task such as trading triggers high levels of cortisol a stress hormone which also impairs memory refined sugar will also slow down neural communication leads to rched brain cells it causes neur Rons to misfire and send erroneous messages that take time and energy to sort out and it damages your new ones so if you start your day with any processed sugary Foods or drinks you are basically handicapping your brain and making trading more difficult than it already is the simple fix is to avoid those types of food
I personally trade early in the morning and I do so in a fasted State I don't eat breakfast the next thing is sleep being sleep-deprived has the same effects as being intoxicated with alcohol after just 17 to 18 hours of wait your cognitive impairment is the same as having a blood alcohol concentration of 05% the drink driving limits in most countries is 08 do you go any longer than 20 hours without sleep your impairment Rises the equivalent of 0.1 which would instantly put you over the legal safe driving limits presumably you wouldn't trade drunk so
it's pretty foolish to trade if you didn't get a full night's sleep without adequate sleep the frontal temporal and parental lobes in the cortex of your brain shrink the connection between your amygdala which is the part of your brain responsible for fear and emotions and part of your intuitive system and the prefrontal cortex which is your rational th in your logical system is actually cut making communication between the two impossible rational decision- making is impaired judgment is dulled and emotional desire ratches up your brain's Reward Center becomes overactive making you more likely to take risks
to seek reward and the punishment sensor is turned off so you don't care about losing money you're also more likely to lose focus and find it hard to maintain your attention on a single task for very long so in no uncertain terms if you're coming into trade in after a poor lik sleep you are setting yourself up for poor performance the solution is to make sure you are well rested and if you are tired just don't trade that day and the final thing on these quick physical fixes is exercise as little as 20 minutes of
aerobic exercise facilitates better information processing rational decision- making and improves memory by actually increasing the size of your hippocampus your pref fund proc cortex and the medial temporal cortex so we've just seen how food and diet can shrink your brain and now we've got something that can help grow it exercise stimulates the release of growth hormones that promote the growth of new brain cells it also increases serotonin which Canter balances the chemicals that your amydala releases to prepare you for fight or flight and it improves sleep which we've obviously just talked about but one of
the best benefits specifically for Traders is the Improvement in your stress responses exercise is a form of stress it pushes your body out of its comfort zone increasing the workload on your muscles heart and lungs and what that does is desensitizes you to many of the physiological symptoms of fear and anxiety associated with trading as you become more accustomed to those physical sensations of say a faster heartbeat for example you become habituated to them and less likely to respond to them when you experience them in trading so hydration food sleep and exercise four really simple
factors to be aware of and make small changes to which can instantly improve your trading performance but now I'm going to cover some more complex strategies that although they take more effort will produce more significant changes for you these are the important ones the first thing we want to work on is retraining your intuitive system remember this is your defense system that is over sensitive and maladaptive to the trading environment so let's recalibrate it and I'll give you three strategies for this the first one may sound a bit silly but it's backed by science it's
to talk through your decision process live brain scans show that talking out loud about what you're thinking engages more of your brain than merely thinking to yourself and with more of your brain involved in the process you are able to think more efficiently and make better decisions so the next time you're trading and you face a decision Junction talk it through out loud say what you're thinking admit any indecision or confusion and explain out loud why you're going to go ahead with a particular choice I know you will feel silly and this isn't a technique
that you're going to use for the rest of your career but it's a very effective strategy in the early stages of retraining your systems the second strategy is Progressive desensitization now imagine going straight up to a 10 me to hi diving board at a swimming pool and trying to jump off most people would be too scared but by starting jumping feet first just off the side of the pool and then slowly moving up progressively higher boards you can become desensitized and comfortable with each New Height VAR is a classic example of retraining your amydala you
gradually become more and more familiar with a situation until it becomes normal you need to do the same in trading start with demo trading to experience zero risk and then move on to a small Live account and then increase your exposure slowly and progressively in stages what you want to do is reassure your defense system that certain levels of discomfort are normal and don't need to be reacted to and this way you'll learn the difference between acceptable risk that is unavoidable in financial markets and what is excessive or dangerous and so your intuitive defense system
will be relaxed under normal trading and you'll be able to stick to your strategy but it will still be alert and protect you if and when the real risk increases for some reason this is using your defense system to your advantage as an asset exactly like the professionals do and the third strategy is rebalancing feedback loops most Traders think about their trades based on whether they won or lost a winning trade is good and means we did something right a losing trade is bad and something went wrong and we should probably have a new filter
indicator or perhaps look for a new system that inadvertently creates a hand beap for your intuitive system remember earlier in the course when I talked about memory recall well if you pay more attention to losing traits you will have a disproportionate memory recall of losing traits secondly and more importantly you're feeding your intuitive system worthless information a good trade is a trade that is executed according to your strategy a bad trade is one that isn't good trades can win or lose bad trades can win or lose successful Traders assess their trades based on whether it
was a good trade or a bad trade the win or loss element is meaningless and as such they train their intuitive system so it knows what to look for and what to avoid losing Traders on the other hand ignore all the winning trades and they only assess the losing trades because they think a loss means bad but losing trades will have some bad and some good their intuitive mind is never taught the difference and therefore never learns and is never capable of helping the trader so what you need to do is start conducting proper balanced
post trade analysis pay attention to your approach do you tend to do more analysis after a loss or after a bad day and less after wins and good days after wings are you happy and you just ignore whether or not you stu to your rules and likewise after losses are you frustrated and do you quickly assume that something went wrong and you look for a mistake and try and make improvements if you do any of those things you are mistaking outcome for process and if you're doing this you are training your intuitive system very poorly
in fact you can't really call it training at all you're just doing yourself harm make sure you assess every single trade win or loss go down your checklist for your system rules and ask yourself whether you followed your process exactly identify the trades that you did not follow the process identify where you fell down with that process and plan to fix the V on the next trade this is how you correct mistakes and likewise identify the trades that you did follow your plan because these are your good trades that you want to reinforce and do
more of this is non-negotiable as part of your your trading if you're not doing this kind of post trade analysis you are wasting your time even attempting to become a Trader okay so now we're going to move on to your logical system and improving the communication between your logical system and the intuitive system so that you've got better oversight and control and I'll give you two techniques for this to begin with you have to remember that your intuitive system is lightning fast it's always alert it's only interested in right now and it reacts to situations
automatically it is absolutely amazing but for the sake of put inness in layman's terms let's just describe it as a bit impulsive your logical system is more considered it's rational it weighs up the pros and the cons it thinks about the future and importantly it can exert conscious and deliberate influence over your intuitive system this is what acts as an oversight to keep your intuitive system in check and harness its incredible power the problem you have is that your intuitive system is 20 times more powerful and 25 times faster than your logical system and your
logical system is easily distracted and can even go to sleep and therefore it's not always paying attention so the challenge is to keep your logical system from being distracted and keep it aware of what your intuitive system is doing so the first technique is an attention control method pick a routine that's highly automated something like brushing your teeth the aim of this is to try and direct your attention to the automated task at hand without wandering off you're going to see just how untrained a wheat your logical system is the next time you brush your
teeth try and concentrate just on the brushing I guarantee within seconds you'll be thinking about something else and daydreaming notice how long you can remain focused before your mind wanders off and when not if when you're distracted as soon as you realize it gently bring your attention back to the brushing you may only be able to last 5 or 10 seconds to start with but if you practice this daily and you make it part of your routine you will gradually increase the time that you can control your own attention and this is literally strengthening your
logical system and the better you get at this the more control you'll have when trading this is the equivalent of going to the gym for your logical system the next strategy is to slow your thinking down part of the vulnerability to being pushed around by your defensive inuitive system is down to the fact that intuitive system is 25 times faster than the logical system if you want more control and oversight you've got to learn to slow your thinking down so you're going to train yourself in this by taking advantage of everyday situations where you feel
strong urges like checking your phone your email or your social media first of all recognize and describe the urge for example I really want to check my Facebook or I want to check the news and so on next identify if there is a physical feeling that accompanies that urge and if so where is it and I know that may send odd but this is about self-awareness and taking notice of early warning signs so at this stage you pause and you say to yourself okay I've got this urge but you're going to consider acting on it
after you've counted from 1 to 26 now it's important that you count slowly make it last 26 seconds rather than just blast through it in 5 seconds when you get to 26 ask yourself whether the urge is the same is it just as strong or has it reduced if it's the same and it's just as strong repeat the counting but this time count even slower with bidy gaps in between after that you should find that the urge has subsided somewhat even if it's only a tiny bit but if it has you've had a small but
hugely significant success in slowing your thinking down and interrupting that domino effect that Cascade of urges to actions what you're doing here is strengthening your ability to control how you respond to urges urges come from your intuitive system and if your logical system is weak you will always giving to the urge and that is disastrous in trading as you learn to slow down and control this on tasks like checking your phone you're going to carry that strength over into your trading now none of the techniques that I've explained here are going to turn you into
a millionaire Trader overnight you wouldn't change from Homer Simpson to Arnold swun eger simply from one visit to the gym and trading is no different you need to repeat the exercises again and again over weeks and months with a slow linear progression it's not the sexy instant fix that most Traders are looking for but as I've said before 99% of Traders fail forever because they're looking in the wrong place for the solutions the 1% who succeed do what is necessary not what is desired remember the phrase from the start today I will do what others
won't so tomorrow I can do what others can't I hope you've enjoyed this short call of guys it really is only very basic introduction to high performance trading but I hope it was enough to spark your interest and point you in the right direction it's not going to fix your problems just from looking at a few 10-minute videos but as the channel grows I'll try and upload more and put more meat on the bones of this topic if you've enjoyed this please like comment and share and if you're not already please consider subscribing to the
channel thanks for watching and I'll see you next time
