It started with a set of rims.
When we talk about betting on yourself, we mean it the literal way. I sold the rims off my car for my last $2,000 and went all in on trading. It was make it or break it. The math was simple and it was brutal: to make that $2,000 back working at Starbucks would take four or five months. The rims were the same $2,000 sitting on the wheels of the car. So the choice was to grind for four or five months, or sell the rims today and find out right now whether this thing was real.
That is where most of the emotional side of this actually lives. Not in the candles, not in the charts. In the moment you decide you are going to do this, and you put something real on the line to prove it. Bao did the same thing in his own way. He took a mortgage out on his house to fund one of his trading accounts. That is how big a bet on himself looked. Selling rims off a car was the same bet, just at a different number.
I certainly don’t recommend mortgaging your home to trade stocks, but that’s what Bao did. So, I had to tell you the truth.
People love to say you will never be successful unless you do what you love. The honest version is messier than that. Most traders at MIC did not love trading at the start. I hated almost everything else, then found something I actually liked. So the thought was, here is something I like, I might as well try to take advantage of that. That was enough. I was excited to watch videos. Excited to do research. Passionate enough that if the rims money had been blown, I would have sold the Xbox, sold the shoes, found another way back to the desk.
The belief came first. The skill came later.
Trading through people who think you are an idiot
Nobody around me saw a light at the end of the tunnel. The opposite, actually. My dad lost a serious amount of money in the 2008 crash, panic selling at the bottom, holding names like Sirius XM and Netflix and dumping them in fear. So when I came home talking about day trading, the read was obvious. You are a gambler and an idiot, you are going to lose all of it, and you need to stay in school, because school is the only way out of being broke.
Meanwhile theres kids in college making a couple hundred bucks a week trading, paying classmates to handle the homework so there was more time for the screens. Telling the family, I am making real money here, I want to drop out, school is eating the time I need. And the answer is always the same: no, you are going to lose all of it.
The turning point for me was a single trade, $60,000 on a small cap ticker, the kind of trade where you look up after and genuinely do not know what just happened. That money paid for a trip to a trading conference in Las Vegas. That conference is where my dad met Bao for the first time, watched him present, and thought, this guy is smart, this guy is normal, not some snobby Wall Street type. That was the first crack in the doubt.
Even then the family figured it was beginner’s luck. The real shift did not come until the first six figure day. That is when my dad finally said, “okay, maybe there is something here.”
The lesson underneath it is one we come back to constantly here at MIC when traders go through the mental struggle of leveling up: you cannot outsource your conviction to people who cannot see what you see. The people who love you most will doubt you the longest, because all they care about is that you do not get hurt. You have to carry the belief yourself until the results are loud enough to speak for you.
The pain feels the same at $100 or $1,000
Here is the part nobody wants to hear. The emotion that runs trading is not greed and it is not even fear of losing money. It is the fear of being a loser.
I did not care if he lost $100 or $1,000. The pain felt the same. It is the pain of being wrong, the pain of being a loser, and that is the thing I never wanted to be.
Sit with that, because it changes how you manage yourself at the desk. If the sting is about being wrong and not about the dollar amount, then no position size makes the feeling go away. The work is learning to take the hit without letting it run you.
In trading you have to get used to getting beat up. You have to be used to losing. You have to be used to not being right all the time.
I grew up stubborn, headstrong, a whole family of people who do not back down, and that mindset cuts both ways in this game. It keeps you in the seat when it gets ugly. It also makes you fight trades you should have let go. Learning to hear both sides of a trade before picking one, instead of marrying your position, is a big piece of how you make day trading less stressful over time.
emotionless in the market and emotional everywhere else
This is the contradiction at the center of all of it. The more emotional you get in the market, the more you suck. The less emotional you get, the more money you make. Flat, detached, mechanical, that is the trader you want to be when the bell rings.
Then you stand up from the desk and the exact opposite is true. A while back someone told me, “you are completely detached from everything, all you care about is this stupid stock market thing.”
And the hard truth is they were not wrong. You spend all day training yourself to feel nothing so the market cannot push you around, and that same wiring follows you to dinner, to dates, to the people who actually need you to feel something.
So you end up with two opposite skills that you have to run at the same time. Be a statue in the market. Be a human with the people you love. The more emotion you pour into the market the worse you trade, and the more emotion you cut out of your life the more your relationships suffer. Nobody fully solves this.
Protecting your edge means protecting your head, which is why we talk so much about how to preserve your mental capital instead of just your account balance. The balance between the two is the actual work, and it never really ends.
Trade less, make more, feel better
Once the emotional piece clicks, something strange shows up in the numbers. The less we trade, the more we make.
Most of the money I make as a day trader is made by 9:50 a.m. or 10:00 a.m. ET. If I am still in something past 10:00 a.m. ET, that usually means I am just wiggling around a position. Past 10:30 a.m. ET, it means I am fighting. Not trading, fighting. Recognizing that, and actually walking away once the good window closes, is one of the simplest upgrades a trader can make.
And it does more than protect the account. When I finish trading early, I am in a good mood for the entire day. When I sit at the desk all day grinding, I feel drained, shot, tired, complaining, just not myself. So cutting the screen time does two things at once. It makes more money because you stop doing dumb things out of boredom, and it makes you happier because you get our day back.
The other piece is focus. I would rather be the expert of one thing than the jack of all trades.
Shorting small caps for day trades and then taking that money and buying good companies for long term investments is what I do best. I consider myself an expert at it. I am not going to burn months trying to learn large cap day trading and small cap day trading just to be mediocre at both.
Money was never the scoreboard I thought it was
For a long time the assumption was that money would fix the inside the same way it fixed the outside. It does not.
I had all the money coming in and still felt a void. An emptiness. Like I was on an island and something was missing.
Money solves a lot of problems, real ones, and I will never pretend it does not. But it does not hand you happiness, and a lot of traders chase consistency believing it will.
There’s a saying that goes, “some people are so poor all they have is money.” I love that. It reminds to focus on humility and relationships more. Money isn’t everything. Don’t make money everything you think about.
There is this idea of a promised land, that the day you become consistent your emotional issues disappear, the beaches show up, and you never struggle again. It is not true. If your friends are using you for money, or you are not right with your family, or you are just in an unhealthy place, all the green days in the world will not touch that.
What actually filled the void for me was purpose. I got a hundred messages a day from new traders asking questions. Spending 15-20 minutes answering one of them, then hearing a week later that the lesson helped someone bank a $1,000 trade and take their family on a road trip, that brings more happiness than making six figures in a single day.
Nobody believes that until they make the money themselves and feel empty inside. That feeling is also part of why people take so long to get right, and it connects to a question we get constantly about how long it takes to get consistent, because the emotional foundation has to come up at the same time as the skill.
Who you stand next to decides who you become
A trader’s emotions are not built in a vacuum. They are built by the room.
I try to surround himself with people who do not care about money. Business owners, hardworking people, the ones who understand the grind. They keep me humble.
Being around people who do not understand your goals, on the other hand, is draining. It quietly pulls you off course, makes you forget what you were shooting for, makes you lazy. Put yourself next to ambitious people and the opposite happens. You get a friendly competition that pushes everyone further. One person starts the morning with two lessons, so the next person does three. That is the energy that moves you to the next level.
Bao is the clearest example of this we have.
One night, I watched Bao take out $100 at a club and tip the bathroom attendant, his logic being that the bottle waitresses get all the money and all the attention, while the attendants and the bodyguards get looked over. He always takes care of the people nobody else thinks about.
Watching that up close taught me something that carries straight back into how I handle myself at the desk: if you do the right thing and you are good to people, the world has a strange way of rewarding you for it.
That lesson from Bao keeps me grounded. He reminds us about the little guy. He is teaching us to be less greedy and more caring, which sounds like it has nothing to do with trading until you realize that greed and ego are exactly what blow up accounts.
Where the control actually comes from
The happiest stretch I ever had was not the year with the biggest numbers. It was the year I was hanging out with friends more, seeing family more, watching members improve faster. The money was good, but the mood was not coming from the money.
That is the whole thing. The emotional control did not show up because I made enough to stop worrying. It showed up because the foundation finally came together. Something that brings joy, which is helping people. Something that brings adrenaline and fun, which is trading. A life outside the screen, which is friends. And family that keeps us grounded when the ego starts talking.
So if you are looking for the one habit to start with, start here. Finish your trading early. When I wrap up by 10:00 a.m. ET, I am in a good mood the entire day. When I sit there fighting until close, I am drained, shot, and not myself. Trading less makes more money and it can make you happier, and happiness is the end goal of every single thing we are doing.
Get that one right and the emotions get a whole lot easier to control.
