You’re not meant to feel this unsure when you enter a trade

A benefit of hearing from traders is being reminded of what the real issues are.

Stuff we’ve all dealt with.

Received an email this week about a current approach being too ambiguous.

Ambiguity erodes mental resilience

It’s hard to think in odds when you don’t have clarity.

You find yourself invested in the outcome of each trade.

You end up unsure of the best decision instead of knowing the right one — all while in the heat of battle.

That’s what made me look back at the two trades I’d just taken during today’s trading session, while we were waiting on the Bank of Japan rate decision.

You can see the two trades below. They're nothing-special trades, but you’ll see the connection in a moment.

The first was "The House" playbook trade.
That was followed by fading bad trading—a playbook trade where you know in the moment it’s bad trading you can take the other side of.

Now imagine you’d made those trades. Would your focus be:

Look what I missed out on the short. And how much did I just leave on the table for that long?

But it’s not about that.

Consistent profitable trading year after year is about frequently taking money out of the market.

That’s the gig. Taking money, over and over.

Every week, there are trades that pay well.
Once or twice a month, there are monster payouts.

But most profitable trades are nothing to write home about.
And equally, losers are nothing to get caught up in—because the playbook trades are designed to keep losses to papercuts.

Every experienced trader will say the same.
And not because it sounds good. Because they’ve lived it.
Ever wonder why they sound so indifferent about outcomes? That's why.

The point is this

Trading is already hard enough.

You want to offload as much of the decision-making as possible.
That’s why I operate from a framework of principles and rules of thumb, and only enter specific and repeatable playbook trades.

Even if I get the narrative wrong and I’m on the wrong side, the nuanced specifics of every playbook trade tell you.
That’s enough. I don’t need to think harder. I just get out.

You still have to comprehend the narrative. But even if you get it wrong, the playbook protects you.
That’s the point.

And that changes you.
It moulds you into someone who no longer fixates on the monetary outcome of each trade.
You prefer how it feels to trade with the certainty of systems and odds.
Because you’ve lived it.

I got reminded of that again reading that email.

You can’t think in odds until you’ve done enough reps to prove your process is worth trusting.
If your framework and repeatable trades are ambiguous, you never get black-and-white numbers on how your trading stacks up.
And without that, there’s no real confidence. No trust in what you’re doing.

But once you’ve done enough reps in something that is precisely clear — with no ambiguity — you reach a point where any individual trade means nothing.

Not the two trades I just made.
Not the losses I make regularly either.

Why give a damn?

It’s meaningless.

But I can say that because I’ve done enough of the 'reps'.

Yet there’s no magic number or reps.
Everyone’s different.

All I know is it has to be enough to change your thinking.

And that doesn’t happen because you want it to. It happens because you do it.

I attended Ashtanga yoga classes with Peter Sanson.
He's one of the most advanced practitioners of Ashtanga globally.
But of all the advanced postures he can do, there was this one far less advanced posture that took him four years to do.

Some aspects of trading can come quickly. Others don’t.
It doesn’t mean you stop.
You just keep doing it.

The most important shift in trading is thinking in odds

Not caring about if this trade wins, wins bigger, didn’t win enough, loses—whatever it is.

It’s a shift in how you think about trading and how you go about trading.

You stop assigning meaning to outcomes.

Because you’re thinking in odds.
There is the uncertainty of the next trade outcome.
But there is the certainty of odds.

And once you’ve done it enough, it’s in your DNA.
Even though it’s the shift most traders never make, you're now thinking and acting like the traders you most admire.