Dec 18, 2020
What gaps in your trading are you suffering from? Yeah, I said gaps in your trading, not trading gaps. Normally, a gap is something on a chart where the stock, you know, it makes a jump in it, there's a little hole there in the chart, I'm not talking about those type of gaps. I'm talking about the gaps that occur in how well you're trading.
So let me explain. Obviously, you want to be a better trader, that means you're going to make more money, that means you're going to be able to do more things in your life, you're going to have more time, you're gonna be able to buy more things that are state of mind, peace of mind, all those great things right now, you already know that hopefully, you already have an idea of what you want the money for.
Of course, it's not just the money, it's, you know, break down bottom line, we want to be happier, we want to live better lives. So that's why your trading? I agree. That's great. Awesome. That's step number one, we get to know why. Right? why we're doing it. But then it comes to Okay, this is what I want, how do I get there? And it's like, we're on one side of a cliff. And then there's a chasm, right, a gap. And then there's the goal on the other side of the cliff, which is being a profitable trader. So now you have to figure out, Okay, how do I get from one side to the other. And for everybody, there's a different gap.
Everybody doesn't face the same gap, but depends on many different things. So now I'm going to go through several of the gaps that are out there that trip up the most people, okay, then once you understand what your gap is, then you can go and you can fill it in. And you can take care of it. And we have resources to help you. So once you figure out what your gap is, you can email us and say, “Hey, this is my gap, how can I fill this in?” Okay, and we have programs where we look at, we've looked at all of these different gaps. And we've have, okay, in order to somebody has this gap, they get this, somebody has this gap, they get this, if somebody has this gap, they get this.
So we've tried to identify every single gap that's out there, and I'm going to cover a few of them here, and how to fill them in. And that's the only way you can really get to become a successful trader is of all the gaps are filled in. Now, these are not like little potholes where you can, you know, just, oh, it's uncomfortable. But yeah, you get through it, no, these are big holes in the ground. And if you don't fill them in, if you don't take care of them properly, then they are going to stop you in your tracks and you are not going to get to your goal, even if you have all the other gaps filled in, but you have one left eating going to get there. Okay, so let me go through them. And then you can figure out which one you're suffering from, or maybe more than one.
Now, the first one is the knowledge gap. So this basically means that you do not have the knowledge to go from where you are now to where you want to be. Okay. And there are different phases of the knowledge gap. Because you cannot just say, Okay, I want to be a wonderful trader, just give me all the knowledge in my head, like upload, right? Can't do that. You start slowly, slowly, slowly with the first things you don't know. And then you build on top of that. So if you are in this gap, and if you don't know what to do, if you are new to trading, if you're new to investing, or if you're new to options, whatever, you don't have the information, you start with the book “Passive Trading”, and you can get that for free at passivetrading.com/free. Just go there, get the book, start reading it, start learning it, we get other bonuses that will help you as well. And that is how you start to overcome this gap. It's not gonna happen overnight, you're gonna fill it in, fill it and fill it in enough to get by then you're going to go further and you see Oh, there's another knowledge gap. Because as you go on, as you start this road, you're going to realize what you don't know right now you don't know what you don't know. Hmm, makes sense. You do not know the things that you need to know but you still don't know. And so as you go along the road, those knowledge gaps will appear and you'll be like, Okay, I'm stuck here. I don't know how to do this. Then you find the answer. What I don't want you to do is say I have to master everything before I start.
No. Let's not do that. Then you'll never start because nobody knows everything. Nobody masters everything. And especially comes to trading. Nobody masters trading ever. You do really well, but nobody masters it. Okay, nobody masters the market, you trade the market the best way you can. And you hopefully you come out successful if you trade your way, it's a proven way. So yeah, you should work, but nobody masters the market. Okay, so now you have this knowledge gap, start with that book, start with the basics. And it'll give you the information that you need to move to the next level.
And then you'll get to another gap. And then you can show that in and then you can fill it in and fill it in. Okay, so that's gap number one, the knowledge gap. And this is not just one time it occurs over and over again. The second gap, very, very important. And this one most people don't have, it's the skills gap. And by they don't have meaning they suffer from this, they don't have the right skills. Okay. So what this means is that you actually know how to do the process, you actually know how to put on the trade, how to monitor it, how to manage it, how to exit it when you should, when you shouldn't, you can get a trading plan to tell you this stuff. And that will give you some knowledge. But it will not give you the skill until you do it until you do the thing over and over and over and over again, until it's in the back of your mind. It's like the back of your hand.
And you could be like, yeah, I can do this in my sleep. Even then you probably gonna screw up. The other day, I put on a covered call trade, and I screwed it up. Yeah, I screwed it up. I bought 100 shares and I sold two options against it. And I later on I realized my thing, and I'm like, Oh my god, what the heck did I do, you know, the amount of money that I was supposed to make on that trade, I gave it away when I sold the second option. So now even though if the trade is going to work out, which is going to, I'm still gonna add best I'm gonna break even. So yeah, skills are very important. Okay, even after 15 years of trading, you can still mess it up. So if you mess it up, now, I don't fault you. Right, but you got to put in that effort, you got to overcome the skills gap. And the only way to do that is to just do it over and over and over and over and over again, I can't make you do it. I can't sit there and watch you do it, you have to do it. Okay, I can encourage you and on the sidelines but you got to do it. Right? If you never do it, you'll never overcome the skills gap.
And we do have students, and I've seen them, I've talked to them, they want all the education, they want to buy everything. And they go through everything, and they do it multiple times. But when it comes time to actually putting on the trade, they back off, because they don't have the skill. They see that huge skill gap. And they're like, Oh, no, I don't know how to do it. Well, baby steps, baby steps, paper trade, try it, do a small little trade tiny trade, you know, so that if you lose the money, if you lose all of the money on the tiny trade, it's not going to kill you. Right, it's gonna go towards your education. It's like an investment, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna risk $100 to do this trade. And even if it blows up, that's $100, I invested into my education. And I put a trade on and I learned it. Right, I learned what not to do. In that case, if it blows up, but at least you did it you know, once you get over that hump, once you get this skills gap down. I don't know if you ever will. But just like the knowledge gap, there are different skills gap, you know, putting on the trade, that's one skill, managing the trades and finding skill, finding trades, those are all different skills, and you have to do them over and over again.
Eventually, they become like second nature, and you get really, really good at it. So you know what you're doing. That's where I need you to get to, to become a really consistent successful trader, you got to overcome that gap by doing actual work. Third, the motivation gap. Now, I talked about this earlier, hopefully, you already know why you're doing this, why you want to be a trader. But if it's only to make money, that probably will not be enough. In the beginning. Let's say you have a lot of debt, you want to quit your job. See that's different. quitting your job is different from I want to make a lot of money. That's a different motivation. And I love that one I love I want to quit my job, or I need XYZ money to be able to send my kid to college, or I need this to because my car is about to die and I need to replace it. Those are better than I need more money. I want to make more money. Because more money in your bank accounts, is gonna do anything for you. You're not gonna be much happier. You're not gonna it's not gonna change the world is just numbers on a screen. So whether it's 1000 or 5000 or 10,000 on the screen, it doesn't make any difference. And eventually that wears off.
First couple of times. You'll be like yeah, no a lot of money and then they'll be like, Oh, yeah, it's not that much. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I did it. Okay, I got a lot of money. I got 10,000 in my account. Yay. It'll go away. So You have to understand what is your motivation. So the motivational gap is really big for a lot of people, sometimes they don't feel the need to trade, or they know feel the need to overcome the skills gap. Now give the example of my father, right, he was motivated to make more money. And so if you put in front something in front of him, like a course, or a seminar or two day, like a two day workshop or something, he would buy it, because he was motivated to make more money. And you would actually go and do the thing, you would go and try to get the knowledge because he knew he had a knowledge gap. So you try to fill in the gap of knowledge. But then when it came time to actually doing the thing, he almost never did the thing. He never overcame the skills gap. Why? Because his motivation gap was not filled in. He wasn't motivated enough to make a bigger change, he was motivated a tiny, tiny bit, to invest in something and to try to overcome the knowledge gap. But he was not, his motivation gap was blocking him from overcoming the skills gap. So this kind of gets tricky, right? I told you, there's lots of motivation gaps, there's lots of skills gaps, there's lots of knowledge gaps, there's gaps all over the place. But you can do them if you go through the path, and you fill them in as they go along. So yeah, your motivation has to be really great. In the beginning. For me, my motivation, when I first started was my wife is working two jobs, and I want her to only work one job, and I want to be a provider in the household. I want to take care of my family. I want to have kids, I want to get out of this rinky dinky apartment, right. The only way I can do that is if I'm making money. So that was my motivation along with I don't want to go back to work because I had just gotten laid off. No, I don't want to go back to work. I need this to work. That was my motivation. And that was the same motivation for several years, until we got to the point where the money was there. It was coming. He was flowing. And then I kind of lost my way. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I'm making money. That's great. Okay, I'm kind of tired. I'm sick. I'm like, bored of life. I gotta find something. What am I gonna do? Okay, I went and I raised a, I learned how to race NASCAR's.
I mean, it was like a $3,000 for a one day package. You know, we actually go and you you do a NASCAR 200 miles an hour per hour and do that. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's great. You know, I got some adrenaline, but I'm still not motivated. You know, I don't feel like getting up in the morning. Why? What is that be motivation gap, really, really big motivation gap. And I learned that the key to filling the motivation gap, after you fill the little baby motivation, gaps of I need more money, more money. Once you have the money. The next motivation gap that comes is I need significance, I need something in my life that I'm doing that I gain significance from that I feel important that I feel growth that I feel loved.
And the only when I started to train people and to teach people, that's when I started getting that. So this podcast is in a way, helping me overcome my motivation gap. So thank you for listening, I do appreciate it. I do appreciate all your support all the comments, all the feedback, emails, all their positive reviews. I appreciate all of that. So thank you very much for that. Thank you so much.
Now, after we have the motivation gap, we have the habits gap. Now these are any, you know, daily or weekly habits that you have that are stopping you from achieving your goals. So does proper trading, have habits that you need to have in order to succeed? Yes. One thing is you got to watch your trade. Right? You can't just forget about it. It's not set it and forget it kind of things. Because the marking can go up and down. Even with the odds in your favor, you should still monitor your trades on a daily basis.
Depending on the strategy. If you're doing cover calls, then Okay, maybe not every day, maybe you do it once a week, maybe once a month, that's up to you be too many on how aggressive or conservative you are. If you're doing something like our oil option strategy, I would like you to check in every day and see how oil is doing how your trades are doing. If you go 234 days too long, and you're not checking, that could be a bad thing and you might be negative, you might start losing some money. That's not a good thing. That's not going to help you on your goal. So that is a habit that needs to be instilled. And so one of the habits I instill and I tell everybody is you should have a time every day that you check on your trades. Same time every day for me, I do it at one o'clock, one o'clock Central. I have an alarm on my phone, he goes off ding ding ding ding ding, time to check my trades. Now I'll drop whatever I'm doing. And I will log in, and I will check my trades. If I need to adjust or do something, most of time, I don't need to do anything. So it didn't take very long. But that is a habit that I had to instill. I have other habits that I've also instilled, that have made me a much better trader. And we talked about them in our trade hacks program, which is very cheap. And if you want it, you can get it on our website, it's called trading hacks, I don't have the time to go into all of those, that's, you know, several hour program, and it goes through all of them. But if you have a habit program problem, then something like that, the hacks that we have come up with can definitely help you because you don't have to change yourself. Right?
You don't have to have the willpower because willpower doesn't work. If you've been on a diet, or being like, yeah, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this willpower doesn't work, you have to change the environment, you have to change your behavior, you have to change your habits, you have to change something other than yourself. Because willpower by itself will not work. And so the trading hacks program that we have, it covers several different easy things that you can implement, that you don't have to change anything about yourself or your trading. But like I said, with the one o'clock check in, right, that's one hack that I've implemented, that has really, really helped my trading.
So if you do something like that, that can make a big difference, doesn't have to change my trading, doesn't have to change anything about my style. But it's just a reminder, like, Hey, you need to do this, this is a skill - a habit sorry, not a skill, it's a habit that I needed to implement. And once I did, it made a big difference.
The other one is your environment, the environment gap. So where you trade has a big impact on how you trade? Do you have a nice quiet spot that you can trade from? Do you have the freedom to trade, like if you're hiding from your spouse, and you're still trading, that's going to be a lot of stress, that's not a good environment? Right, you got to get your spouse to buy in, don't be trading behind her back, or his back and try to think that Yeah, you're gonna be a great trader, there might work for a little bit. But overall, that is a very negative environment, right?
When you're trying to hide it, you're gonna feel guilty, you're gonna feel bad, and Heaven forbid you lose money, oh, man, that's just going to compound everything. So your environment needs to lead you to be successful. Do you have a fast enough internet connection? Now you don't need four different monitors. You don't even need two monitors, you just need one screen that you can trade from. But you need a good enough internet connection that that's there, you need maybe a phone where you can check in on your trades smartphone, you need some basic stuff. But if you don't have it, that makes it much harder for you. And if you don't have a spot where you can actually sit down and learn and go through the environment go through the education, right, if you join one of our programs, there's a lot of information that you're going to get.
If you don't have a spot to properly go through it, then what's the point? So the environment is another gap, probably one of the most easier ones that you can overcome. Right. And so that's the last one. So we got knowledge gaps, that are recurring, they happen over and over again, you'll learn a little bit, you'll move forward, then you'll realize oh, I need something I need to know something else. So then you learn the next thing. Don't try to learn everything at once. Learn them in bites, right, move forward, learn some more, move forward, learn some more when you get to a gap, learn some more, fill it in, move on to the next one.
Skills gap. There are also several of those because you don't know what skills you need yet. So focus on one skill, work on that move forward, then you find Okay, I need another one. So now you get the education for that one knowledge for that one. And then you do the scale. And you fill that in then you go forward and you go forward.
Motivation gaps. This is when you have to figure out for yourself. What is it that's going to keep me focused, keep me motivated, so that I don't give up. That's the thing people give up. They just stop. You know what I'm talking about is passive trading. I've been doing this for a long time. And I've seen the results. And I know this works. And I know it's great in the feeling that you get when you're doing it well is amazing.
So I don't understand why people stop in the middle. Now I know it can take work. I know it can take a lot of time. But if you have the motivation, you should be able to overcome the rest of the gaps. That's probably the most important one that you need to overcome the motivational gap. Everything else I can help you with. Right, I can't help you motivate yourself. Then you got to habit gaps. Right if you know something that you keep doing over and over. And again, that's hurting you, that is a habit that you need to change. You can't break a habit, you need to replace it with something else. Right? So if you have a habit and your habit is Oh, I don't I don't I forget them on my trading plan. I don't stick to my trading plan, or I don't stick to my rules. My rules, say, of the trade is down so much money, I got to do XYZ, but I don't. Well, that's a habit that you need to change.
If you already know that, you're that's half the battle, right? Like GI Joe, no knowledge is off the bottle. Yeah, I think you GI Joe. And so now you have the knowledge. Now you got to change the habit. So you overcome that gap. And then the last one is the environment, which is probably the easiest one.
So I hope this helped. I hope you can overcome these gaps. If you have any issues, you can reach out to us help@optiongenius.com and trading hacks is the name of the program that can help you overcome a lot of these habit hacks. In terms of education, and skills, we can help you there as well, we have several programs that can help you depending on what you want to accomplish, what you want to be trading. So reach out to us there as well.
And again, thank you so much for listening, trade with the odds in your favor, and have a great day. Thanks.
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