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00:00
What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Trader Code.
Today's episode hits different. We're going to be diving into the mindset that's made and destroyed more traders than anything else.
The one belief that kept me sane when I was losing everything. The same belief that
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helped me make my first million dollars from trading. So, if you have ever felt stuck, obsessed with making money, or trapped in your own head every time you press the buy and sell button, this episode for you.
Before I begin, where's your green tea, bro? Go and get a green
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tea. All right, let's get right into it.
As a professional trader, my goal is to make a ton of money, but my job is to take the best trade and let the results take care of themselves over time. And look, this might sound like a contradiction at first, right?
But this
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is the exact mental framework that has kept me sane and profitable in this game for the past seven years. So, let me separate those two things because they are both critical.
Yes, my goal is to make a ton of money, a ton of money. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I'm not doing this for fun.
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I'm not doing this as a hobby, okay? I'm here to build wealth.
I'm here to create financial freedom and to win. That's the goal, right?
That's why we are all here, right? And anyone who tells you that they don't care about the money is either lying to you or they're just not going to last very long in this business.
But here's the thing, and this
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is where most traders completely lose the plot. My job is not my goal.
My job is not to make money. My job is to execute the best trade I can find according to my strategy.
My job is to follow my process. My job is to take the
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setups that meet my criterion and then let go of the outcome. And this is the beautiful paradox of trading.
The more you focus on making money on any individual trade, the worse you're going to do. The more you can detach from the outcome and focus purely on execution,
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the more money you're gonna make over time. So when I sit down to trade, I'm not thinking about, oh, I need to make 60K today because I know that's a recipe for overtrading, forcing trade, revenge trading, you know, all the stupid mistakes that actually blow up accounts.
Instead, I'm thinking what are the best
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opportunities available to me right now based on my edge? And that is my inner dialogue every damn day.
So before I enter for a trade, I ask myself, is this a quality setup? Does this meet my criterion?
Am I taking this for the right reason? Not oh, how
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much am I going to make from this one trade itself? After I exit the trade, whether I win or lose the trade, I ask myself, did I execute properly?
Did I follow my trading plan? Not, oh, why didn't I make more money?
Or I'm such an
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idiot for losing. And look, when I say you can't lose with this mentality, I don't mean you won't have losing trade.
You will you will have them all the time. What I mean is you can't lose at the game of trading over time.
If you maintain this separation because if your
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job is execution and you do your job well, the goal takes care of itself. The money comes.
It has to. It's just math over a large sample size of data.
But if you make money the job itself, you are going to sabotage yourself constantly.
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You will take trades that you shouldn't. You will skip trades that you should take.
You will exit too early. You will hold a losing position too long.
All because you're focused on the wrong thing. Steve Jobs believed he could change the world with a computer as thin
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as a book. Alexander the Great thought he could conquer the entire world before he was 25.
Napoleon came from nothing and believed he was destined to rule Europe. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team and still believed he
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would be the greatest to ever play this game. Every single one of these people look insane to the people around them at some point.
Every single one had what society would call delusions of grandeur. But that delusion, that's what
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separated them from everyone else. Let me tell you why I know this to be true.
Because I lived it myself. Growing up with Asian parents, my path was already written for me.
Get straight A's, go to university, land a safe 9 to5 job at a
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bank, make 5K to 10K a month, get a mortgage, buy a car. That was their definition of success.
Stability, security, you know, the respected the conventional path. But it wasn't mine.
To me, success has always meant one thing. getting what you want from life.
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So when I was 19 years old, I made my first $10,000 from trading. And I think that moment gave me a taste of freedom.
And then I looked at my mom right in the eyes and I told her straight, "I'm not going to university, mom." She was enraged. I could literally see her veins
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popping out of her head and her neck. And she told me that it would never last.
My friends doubted me. Everyone around me said I was making the biggest mistake of my life.
And they all expected me to fail and come crawling back to the real world. And for months,
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for years, she was right. My friends were right because I failed at trading over and over again.
I was losing the money. I was blowing accounts.
I was struggling. But deep down, I knew she would eventually be wrong.
I knew that if I kept pushing, I kept eating dirt. I
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would eventually figure this game out. It was then I adopted this mindset.
Eat for five years in trading so you can eat cavia for a lifetime. That decision came with a price.
In order to live life on my own terms, I
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had to cue my parents' dream to protect my own. I had to accept their disapproval and the loneliness of walking a path that no one around me believed in.
But regret would have been far worse. I wasn't just fighting the market.
I was fighting my family's
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definition of success. I was fighting the version of me that wanted to quit every single time I blew an account.
So on the day that I told my mom that I wasn't going to university, I also made a promise to myself. I'll make $1 million from trading.
And when I do and
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I show her the bank account, she would have nothing left to say. And once again, here's the crazy part.
She was right for so many years. I kept losing money for another year.
Two years later, I kind of figured things out. you know, became somewhat profitable but not consistently profitable.
Year three, I
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was consistent. Year four, year five, I made my first million dollars.
So, I pulled out my bank balance, show my mom, she see two commas on the bank account itself. That's the proof.
And she just looked at me and said, "Okay." And that was it. No fireworks, no celebration,
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just one word. Because in that moment, I knew I had killed her dream and saved mine.
And to make it even more real, around [snorts] that same time, I got accepted into three of the most renowned universities in Singapore. And once
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again, it was everything my parents have ever wanted for me. But I rejected them all because once again, I had promised myself that if I achieved $1 million from trading, I wouldn't take the safe route.
I wouldn't have a plan B. Trading was it.
No plan B. My boats were burnt.
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So when I say every person who's done something great had delusions of grand, I mean it. Because when I was 19 years old, losing money with everyone telling me that I was delusional, I was stupid.
I believe I'll make that million dollars. I believed it when no one else
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did. That belief looked insane to everyone around me.
But that delusion, that's what carried me through the dark years, the blown accounts, the losses. So remember the world belong to optimists.
Not blind optimists but like
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the ones who can see a future that doesn't exist yet and refuse to let anyone talk them out of it. You have to believe in your vision with every ounce of your being before everyone else catches on because they won't catch on
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until you have already made it. That's just how it works.
You know what's the biggest lie in trading? that you need more information, more courses, more books, more videos, more strategies.
But here's the truth, my friend. You're not
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suffering from information overload. You're suffering from implementation underload.
Look, I get it, man. When you're starting out, it feels so much safer to keep learning, to keep starting, to read one more book, watch one more YouTube video, take one more
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course, because as long as you're learning, you're not losing money, right? You know, you're in your nice little cocoon.
Wrong. You're losing something that is way more valuable than money.
You're losing time. I've seen so many traders spend years consuming
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content. You know, they can quote every single trading book they have ever written.
They know every single trading strategy, every single indicator, every single pattern, but they have barely taken 50 trade in their entire life. And then they wonder why they're not getting anywhere.
Here's what nobody tells you.
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You will learn more from your first 100 trade than every single trading book you read combined. Because books teaches you theory, the market teaches you reality.
And those two things are not the same. A book can tell you about risk management,
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but it can't teach you what it feels like when you are down 5% on a position and your heart is pumping and racing and you're secondg guessing everything. Only taking that trade teaches you that.
A video can show you a perfect setup, a perfect entry model, but it can't teach
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you what it's like to watch that perfect setup fail three times in a row and still have the discipline to take it the fourth time. Only living through that teaches you that a course can explain trading psychology.
But I can't teach
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you how your own mind will sabotage in ways that will be completely foreign to you. Only your own traits teaches you that the market is not a textbook.
It's the greatest mentor to ever exist. It's a battlefield.
And you
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don't learn how to fight by reading about war. You learn by getting punched in the face over and over again, making mistakes, adjusting, and going back in a damn ring.
Your first 100 trade going to be super messy. You're going to make every single mistake in the book.
You're
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going to enter too early, exit too late, risk too much, hold a trade too long, cut winners short, let losses run. You're going to do all of it.
And guess what? That's exactly what you need to do.
Because those mistakes, they are not failures. They are data points.
Every
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trade is a feedback. Every loss is a lesson.
Every mistake is information you couldn't get any other way. The traders who make it are the ones who start it the most.
They're the ones who implemented the most. They're the ones who got their hands dirty, took the
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pain, learned from the mistakes, and kept going. So, if you have been stuck in learning mode for months or years, I'm telling you right now, stop.
Just stop. Pick a simple strategy, any strategy that makes logical sense to
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you, and go take 100 trade. be in live market conditions or simulated market conditions and then document every single one.
Review them, learn from them, adjust, adapt because remember
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it's not just about doing more reps, it's about reviewing the trades that you have taken as well. So give yourself ample time and space to reflect on your trade because that introspection is what creates principles which will allow you to navigate the complex markets.
You
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will learn more in those 100 trait that you did in the last year of consuming content. I promise you that suffering is the only constant in life.
If you don't actively choose suffering every day, you will not develop the mental toughness that is needed to deal with the everyday
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unchoosen suffering. Let me tell you a quick story.
I will never forget the first time I went into the jungle for basic military training. It was like two, three years ago.
People who didn't serve the military will not understand this, but that first few camp, you know,
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the first time you're in the jungle, that changes you. It humbers you.
It strips you down to nothing. So, I still remember us gathering on the parade square at 4 a.m., you know, half asleep and carrying a rock set that weigh like a freaking dead body.
And the
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commanders were just going down the line checking every single item. If you miss one thing, just one thing, even something stupid like toilet paper or packing or not packing seven liters of water, you got destroyed.
You got screamed at, you got punished. And bear
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in mind that we haven't even stepped into the jungle yet. And then we'll take the bus.
We'll reach the jungle. And we finally reached the few campsite.
They asked for volunteers to set up the latrine area. So me and a couple of friends raised our hands thinking that it' be simple, you know.
Bro, we ended
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up digging literal holes in the ground for 120 people, mosquitoes everywhere, freaking ants this big, crawling on our legs, not getting in our boots. And that was the easy part.
Like the training haven't even started yet.
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And then the real training started. And once again, it was my first time probing through the jungle, you know, head down, rifle up, mud up to my shins, ends crawling up my aunt while I was trying not to freak out.
And then with the
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combat rations, you know, the food that we eat, it tasted like freaking expired cardboard, but you force yourself to eat because if not, you won't have the energy to survive the next four days. And at some point of time, it started raining like crazy.
like not red drizzle but like full monsoon rain, right? Like
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that entire place got flooded and the higherups decided to punish our sergeants in front of us. They made them crawl in the mud, buck like dogs, carry extra rifles, run back and forth until they look broken.
It was up to
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watch. Everyone went silent at a point of time.
We all felt this heaviness in our chest because these guys were the one that is taking care of us. And now they were being humiliated just to set an example.
And right after that
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punishment humiliation thing, the highups told us to fall in. No explanation, no context.
And then they surprised us. Each of us got a handwritten note from our parents, from our loved ones.
And this is the part
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that I will never forget. Every single guy, even the loudest, the most alpha, the most strongest dude in the platoon, broke down.
Like legit cried because we were five days and four nights deep into this jungle with barely
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any sleep, no proper food, rain pouring, you know, our sergeants getting punished, our tents getting soaked, everything's stinking. You haven't bath for like freaking 5 days.
And suddenly you read a letter with your mom telling
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you stay strong we are proud of you bro I'm telling you that breaks something inside you man or maybe it fixes something inside you I don't know but that moment was like I will never forget that moment and then after we received
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the letters you know they gave us 100 plus you know we're happy and and then they made us dig our own shell scripts you know which is like a two men fighting position And I swear it was the hardest physical thing I've ever done at the age of like what 18, 19 years old,
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digging through the roots under the hot sun, muddy rocks, you know, and then later on there's the rain kept washing everything back in. And then my entire body was shaking.
And then the worst part was at night, right? So we pitch our tent right before the sun actually set.
And at around 10 p.m. the rain
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started falling cats and dogs again. And then it made everything wet, right?
My uniform was wet. My boots was wet.
My sleeping bag, not sleeping back, but like the mat that I was laying on was wet. It was horrible.
The smell was horrible as well. You couldn't sleep.
I literally couldn't sleep. And I just
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stood there. No, I just sat there shivering with my body hoping the night would bust foster.
And by the time we came out of the jungle 5 days later, I felt like a different person. The first shower felt like heaven.
my bed, my bunk
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bed, which is like not really super comfortable, it felt like a freaking luxury mattress in a five-star hotel. And seeing my parents felt like someone returned something precious to me.
Now, here's the thing. That was chosen
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suffering. I signed up for it.
The military chose it for me, but I showed up knowing it would be hell. And that chosen suffering, it prepared me for everything that came after the losing streaks in trading, the months where I
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was grinding with no results, the the self-doubt, the the fear, the the uncertainty. Because when life hits you with unchoosen suffering, and it will, you need to already be tough.
You need to have built that mental callous. And
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you don't build that callous by living comfortably. You build it by choosing hard things every day.
By waking up early when you don't want to. By taking the cold shower.
By pushing through the workout when you are tired. By staying
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disciplined when it it will be much easier to quit. Every time you choose suffering, you are making a deposit into your mental toughness account.
And when life withdraw from the account, when the market start turning against you, when everything start going wrong, you start
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blowing accounts, you start filling funding challenges, you start losing money, when you're facing real pain and suffering, you have something to pull from. The military taught me that.
The jungle taught me that. And trading reinforce it every single day.
So choose
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your suffering because if you don't, life will choose it for you. And when it does, you better be ready, man.
Most people tell you to meditate to become profitable. But what actually is meditation?
Because I'll be honest, for
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the longest time, I thought it was some woo woo bush you know? Oh, sit cross-legged, h some mantras, clear your mind, become one with the universe.
That's not it, bro. I define meditation as simply the art of doing nothing.
It's
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the space you create to reflect on your pain so that you can make progress. People think that meditation is about emptying your mind or reaching some zen state.
But for me, meditation is when I
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sit in silence and actually process what happened, the losses, the mistakes, the emotions I was running away from all day long. Because when you're in the thick of trading, you don't actually have time to process what happened.
You know, you're just reacting, you're moving,
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you're in survival mode. You take a loss and you immediately start looking for the next trade so that you can make back the money that you just lost.
You know, you are like just constantly scrolling charts, you're checking news, you're doing anything and everything just so you can avoid sitting with what just happened. But in that quiet space when
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you meditate, that's when you can actually look at your pain and ask, "What is this thing trying to teach me?" That losing trade that piss you off, sit with it. Ask yourself, what do you do wrong?
Where did your emotions take over? Why did you hold a trade for so
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goddamn long? Why do you cut your profitable position so early?
That fear you felt before you enter for the trade. Sit with it.
Where does it come from? What story are you telling yourself?
Why are you afraid to pull the trigger?
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Because meditation isn't just about feeling good. is about feeling everything the discomfort the regret the fear the frustration and then using that reflection to make progress so I don't just give advice right I actually practice what I preach
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so what I do is that every single day without fail I just meditate for five minutes especially every single morning actually like five minutes that's it five minutes before the market opens so I can center myself stay in the present moment and also process whatever that's
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lingering from the day before. And then on Sundays, I do 30 minutes, right?
Like that's my deep reflection time. I just go through the entire week in my head.
All the trades, all the emotions, all the wins and losses. I sit with it and I
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just extract the lessons from each one of these. Now, once again, you don't have to do your reviewing and reflection when you're meditating.
You can also just do nothing. Like I said, it's the art of doing nothing.
So you can literally just sit there, breathe and treat your thoughts as passing cloud,
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right? So you just do nothing and just focus on the present moment, right?
I just focus on the breath. That's how you can meditate as well.
All right? So once again, it's not something that is like a one-size fit all.
Find what works for you. Just understand that that space between action and reaction, that's
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where growth happens. And meditation is how you create that space.
It allows you to be more aware of your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions before you take that damn trade. So yeah, man,
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meditate, bro. But not because some guru told you to do so.
Do it because it's the only way you are going to process your and actually learn from it. The secret to achieving a lot at a relatively young age is not just working hard.
Everybody works hard. That's not
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the differentiator anymore. It's working with a maniacal sense of urgency.
And this is something that I learned from Elon. Most people operate like they have all the time in the world.
They set soft ass deadline. They give themselves cushion.
They say, "I'll get to it
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eventually." And you know what? Eventually never comes.
I'm different. I set insane deadlines for myself.
Unreasonable deadlines. Deadlines that make people look at me like I'm crazy.
The reason why I was so urgent to make a
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million dollars from trading was because of the fact that my father was getting old. So it wasn't about me.
It was about my dad. When I started trading seriously, my dad was already like 65 years old, you know, like that's the age
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where most people have already retired, but he was still working. He was still grinding because he needed to do it to put food on the table for instill kids.
And I looked at him as his hair get more gray and I thought to myself, man, I
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need to retire him and I need to do it now. Not in five years, not in 10 years, now.
That deadline wasn't arbitrary. It was real.
Every year that bus was another year that he had to work, another year of his body breaking down,
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another year that I failed to deliver on the promise that I made to myself. So I became obsessed.
I worked with a level of urgency that most people can never comprehend. Even in the military, I found whatever time I had to trade.
After a road march, everybody will be
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showering, resting, recovering, and there I would be looking at the damn charts on my phone. After an outfield exercise, you know, being in the jungle for a few days, covered in mud, exhausted, I would still pull out my laptop in the bank and analyze my trade
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when I come back. That's how obsessed I was, bro.
People thought I was crazy. Like my bank mates thought I was crazy.
And maybe I was, but I didn't have time to waste. My debt didn't have time to waste.
So when I set the goal to make my first million dollars, I didn't say
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someday. I gave myself a specific time frame and I obsess over it every single day.
And here's what happens when you set insane deadlines. Your mind does everything it can to meet it.
And this is true, right? Like studies have shown
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about this. I think it's called the Parkinson's law or something.
But your mind does everything it can to meet the insane deadline. Your brain is incredibly resourceful when it's under pressure.
It find shortcuts. It eliminate distractions.
It forces you to
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prioritize what actually matters and cut out all the noise, the stuff that doesn't move you closer towards your goal. When you have all the time in the world, you waste all the time in the world.
But when you have a gun to your head, when you have an impossible deadline staring you right in the face,
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when someone you love is depending on you, you become a complete different person. You stop scrolling social media.
You stop procrastinating. You stop making excuses.
You work with urgency. You move faster.
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You execute harder. You do more reps fast.
That's the secret right there. It's not just about hard work anymore.
It's about hard work with urgency. Hard work with a deadline that scares you.
Hard work with a purpose that is bigger
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than you. So set the deadline, feel the pressure, and let it push you to become who you need to be.
You think you fear failing, but you actually fear looking stupid. Let me tell you something,
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buddy. No one is watching you stare at your screen.
So take the damn trade. Now this is the fear that kills most trading careers than like anything else.
It's not the market. It's not the strategy.
It's the fear of what people will think
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if you are wrong if you end up failing at trading. But here's the reality.
Nobody cares. Nobody's watching your trade.
Nobody's keeping score except you. Your friends aren't sitting there waiting to laugh at you.
Your family doesn't know what trade you took today.
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Random people on the internet have no idea who you are. You're trading alone in your room.
It's just you and the screen. So why are you afraid to put a trigger?
Because you are afraid of looking stupid to yourself. You are
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afraid of confirming your own worst fear that you are not good enough. But that's the trap.
You are not good enough because you haven't done enough. By not taking the trade, you guarantee you will never get better.
By sitting on the sidelines afraid to look stupid, you end
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up staying stupid. So take the damn trade.
Be wrong. Look stupid, then learn from it and then take the next one and then you might be wrong and you can look stupid again, but eventually you won't
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be stupid anymore because this is the only way forward. New traders see losses as dirt.
Professionalists see them as diamonds covered in dirt. And here's what separates amateurs from professionals.
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How they view losses. Once again, it's not that professionals don't feel anything when they take a loss.
They are just indifferent to losses. Amateurs take a loss and they feel defeated.
Ah, they feel like they they fail. They want to forget about it
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as fast as possible. and move on.
Professionals on the other hand, they review the loss. They take that loss, they wipe off the dirt, find the diamond, extract the lesson that prevents the same mistake again.
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Same loss, different mindset about losses, different outcome. Because here's the truth.
The only constant in trading is losses. You cannot eliminate them but you can minimize them to maximize profits.
Every single trader no
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matter how good is loses. The best traders in the world lose.
Warren Buffett lose, George Shores lose, 40 Jones lose, Charlie Bunger lose, the hedge fund managers lose, I lose, everybody loses. That's the nature of trading.
You can't avoid losses. But the
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difference is what you do with those losses. Do you let them pile up as emotional baggage or do you treat each one as data point?
Because every loss is telling you something. Maybe your entry is off.
Maybe your risk was way too big. Maybe
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you traded emotionally. Maybe the setup just didn't work this time.
But if you don't review it, if you don't extract the lesson, you're going to repeat the same mistake again and again and again.
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That's what kills accounts. It's not one big loss.
It's the same stupid mistake repeated a hund times, a thousand times because you never stop to learn from it. So review your losses.
Treat them like diamonds. Because the trader who learn
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from your losses faster than everybody else, that's the trader who wins. Trading isn't a finite game like football where there's a score.
It's an infinite game. The only way to win is to keep playing.
Most people treat trading like a sprint. You know, they're trying
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to hit a home run. They're swinging for the fences.
They want to make a million dollars in six months and buy a Lamborghini and retire. That's not how it works, bro.
That's how you blow up. Because the fastest way to blow up is to try to win faster.
Trading isn't about winning one big
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trade. It's about still being in the game five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
Like I said, it's an infinite game. There's no final score.
There's no finish line. I can tell you that the market will be here
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tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that. So, your only job is to preserve your capital.
Manage your risk and avoid the blowups that take you out of the game permanently.
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It's more about ensuring that you have sufficient life so that you can continue playing this longass game because man it's such a tragedy man like I've seen so many traders flame out you know that they have one good year and then they
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get overconfident they overlever they over risk and boom they build their account game over just like that done and I'm still here seven years later not because I'm smarter, not because I'm
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more talented, not because I'm more handsome, but because I choose to play the infinite game. That's it.
I choose to protect my downside. I don't chase trade.
I don't revenge trade. I don't force trade.
I don't risk my entire account on one
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trade ideal because as long as I'm still in the game, I can keep playing. And as long as I can keep playing, I can keep winning.
So, don't try to win today. Try to make sure you're still here tomorrow.
All right, everybody. So, that's it for this episode itself.
If there's one
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thing I want you to take away from this episode is this. Trading isn't about chasing results.
It's about building character. It's about becoming a better person.
When you separate your goal from your job, when you learn to suffer on
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purpose, when you stop hiding behind information and you start implementing, that's when you start becoming dangerous. That's when you become what I call hard to kill.
Not just as a trader, but as a person. Because the game
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rewards those who last the longest. And you only last when your mindset is built for the long run.
Not for the short term, not for today, but for the next 5 years, for the next 10 years, for the next 50 years. Anyways, my name is Brett Go.
This has been episode five of the Trader Code. And remember, your journey
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is the edge. The setbacks are part of the story that you one day tell.