Jan 5, 2022
Hey, this is Allen from option genius. And I am coming to you today from Galveston, which is a beach. So I drove down here today took day off, you know, just hanging out, get some time to think, enjoy the weather. It's not that hot, it's not that cold. But then take a look at this when I get here. This is what it looks like. All foggy, everything was fine. The whole day, everything - the whole road here was fine. It took us about an hour and a half to get here. Everything was fine, good here, and it's all foggy, you can barely see too far in the distance. But that's okay, because that gives me time to shoot you a quick video. And today what I wanted to ask you was are you treating your trading as a business? Or are you treating it as something else? Now, a lot of folks when they talk about their trading, you know, they compare it to their job. It's like, oh, how much do you want to make? Well, I want to make as much as I'm making my job. So they compare trading to their job. Now in the job, you have a performance review, right? So the company manager, whatever the boss tells you how you're doing you personally. And if you're doing well, if you're doing badly, it's all on you. And so if you compare your trading to your job, and you say, Oh yeah, this is my job, this is my second job, then it reflects on you, your results reflect on you. So what I want you to do instead is I want you to think about your trading as a business. Now a business in corporate speak, right? If you incorporate, you are not your business, you might own the business, but the business is a separate entity. Right now, I'm not telling you to go out and form a corporation for your trading - that's a separate topic. But I want you to think of your trading as a business.
Now, you might have heard the statistics right from the SBA, most companies go out of business within the first few years, almost 95% of them go out of business in the first 10 years. Now option genius has been around for 10 years, or more than 10 years, I think 1314 years now. So we must be doing something right. So that's good. I'm happy about that, that we survived. But when you think of your trading as a business, you understand that not everything goes smoothly, not everything goes perfectly. Right. Now, for example, at Option Genius, we might have a new marketing campaign. And we might launch it and I cost a bunch of money. And I have really high hopes and be really excited about it and it falls flat and it doesn't do anything. Every people hate it doesn't work. We lose money. Ah, man, it's disappointing. But it's not a personal failure. Right? It's something that we tried, that did not work. So big difference mentally, versus "Oh, my God", attaching it the results to yourself personally, versus "Oh, it was something else that we tried, and it did not work. Now everybody knows that a business. There are ups and downs, right? There's yours are you make profit, and there's years that you don't make profit. And in trading, we seem to forget that. We seem to think that we should always be making money, we seem to think that we should always every year should be profitable making money. But in the long run, it's not like that. And so if you think of it as a business, if you have a losing year, that's okay. Right? Because that happens. Maybe something happened differently this year in the economy or whatever that caused your business to lose money. That's okay. Business is still found sound, the the foundation of the business, it's still sound, we're not going to just throw the business away because it lost money. Especially if you'd lost money for a whole year. Right? We'll make it back. We have that confidence. Now, most entrepreneurs and then I think of us small time traders as entrepreneurs, because, you know, unless you're a professional managing other people's money, then you might be like, you know, a big CEO of a Fortune 500 company or whatever, you know, bear yourself to that. Well, most of us, I can compare us to entrepreneurs, you know, scrappy, hardworking grinders, right? We really we enjoy the grind and entrepreneurs really enjoy the grind, they enjoy startup phase, they start, you know, bootstrapping, where you learn, and you try new things, and you see what works and what doesn't work and you adapt, and you overcome. And you really learn from every single mistake. Now, for a lot of entrepreneurs, the confidence that comes from success. So for example, if you're talking to a rich person or a rich business person, they are not confident because they have a lot of money.
And this might be counterintuitive, having a lot of money does not give you confidence actually brings you depending on how you got the money, it can actually cause you a lot of anxiety, because you're worried about not losing the money, if you don't know how to make it, right. If it was just given to you, then your whole thought process is I can't lose it, I can't lose it, I can't lose it. Because I don't know how to get more, right. And that's what happens to a lot of people who inherit money or get the lottery, they get it, they can't handle it mentally, it's totally mind blowing. So they lose it all and they can't get back. But as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, if you make the money in the first place, you have that confidence that wow, I made it, I made it right, I did the work, I tried the new things, I took the risk, and it worked. And then if it stops working, or if something happens, and the business goes out of business, and that could happen all the time, they have the confidence that they can get it back, they can make it again, right, because businesses go out of business for all kinds of ways, they might be good for five years, 10 years, and all of a sudden, maybe a new competitor comes and knocks them out. Or maybe the market shifts, or maybe nobody wants that product anymore, or there's a new technology or the government changes the rules or the legislation or who knows what can happen. And this is quite a business all the time. In fact, you know, you look back 100 years ago, let's look at like a 1900, you look at the fortune 100 list, and most of those companies have been around anymore, for whatever reason. So as a business owner, you understand is this goes out of business, you lose money, okay, you get back on the horse, start something else, and you build it back up again. But as traders, we think like oh my god, if I lose my money, that's it, I'm done. I'm done for I can't do anymore, it's a failure, I have to give up, I have to move on, I can't do anything else. That's what is not only limiting to you, but it won't let you trade properly and mentally, that's the wrong way to look at it. So a lot of times we have losses. And a lot of times it's nothing that we did, right? And we lose money. And it might be a big loss, or maybe 100% loss, you might lose the whole account that happens to most people. But if you can get back on the horse, you can do it again, if you've already made the money once, if you already know, hey, I was trading this way it was working, it was successful.
But something happened, something shifted. Or maybe I made a mistake, and I lost the money or the business lost the money, right? Not me, it lives in the business lost, then you know that you can get it back. And it's that mental shift, that it's not over when you lose. That gives you the confidence. And so having confidence in yourself as a trader, and your strategy is probably the most important thing in trading, whether it's trading options, or stocks or futures or whatever you're trading, if you've made it once, you can make it again, to many people, they make it once and it works for six months, a year, two years, and then they have a big loss. And they just give up. Well, maybe that's the right thing to do. But if an entrepreneur lost his business, they have a choice, right? They could be like, oh, man, no, I'm horrible. I sucked at a business and my business went out of business, and they'll never get back on the horse. And it's just, they have a fear and they can't do it again. And your life is gonna be miserable, they're gonna be miserable personally, because they're gonna think they're a failure. And financially, they're not going to get back on the horse, and they're not going to recover. So they're going to be resentful, their family's going to be resentful of them -- all kinds of weird stuff. And that's not what you want to be. So think of it as a business. But think that, hey, if I could do it once, I could do it again, again and again. And that's the confidence that you need to develop. And the only way to do that is to get in the game practice, find a strategy that works for you, make it work, and then keep doing it. So think of it not as a personal thing. Think of it as a separate entity. Number one think of your business as separate from you. So it's not a personal indication or of net worth or personal worth, right? It's net worth yeah, sure, you know, as part of your net worth the asset or the account size, but it's not something that's tied to you personally. So if your account goes down if the stock market goes down if your trades don't work doesn't mean that you are a bad person. It doesn't mean that you're a bad trader, it just means that something didn't work, we need to change it, we need to adapt it, we need to learn what didn't work, how to fix it. And then we keep going. We don't just give up. When something bad happens, we change it, and we keep our confidence high. We do it once we do it again, and again and again. And some sometimes, you know, entrepreneurs are like, Yeah, you know, I want to lose it all. Like, if you you've ever heard of this guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. He said that a few times, he said, You know,
I wish that I could lose it all. Because I know I get it back. And it's going to be more fun getting it back the second time. Right now, when I have too much money, I can do as many cool things as I want to because there's too risky. But if I don't have anything that I can try anything, and it's all on me, and that what it lives for. So, you don't have to be that extreme. If you have money and you lose it. But I do want you to have the confidence that hey, I made it once, you can make it again. So that's it for now and we'll talk to you again soon. Take care.
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