What is going on guys? Welcome to a new video. So the last couple of videos I did then, one was on trending products for 2019 and one for niches and a lot of you have been getting any touch and saying you really enjoyed the videos which is great but you want to know then how I actually found those niches and how I found those products, the kind of methods and strategies I used to do that. So in this video then that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do. So there's a few different methods and then in the second part of the video and probably the most important part as well actually is I'm going to be showing you guys how I can pretty much guarantee if a product is going to be a winner or not. I'm going to be showing you guys the kind of signs then that I look for in a product to tell myself whether that product is actually selling really well or not. So there's a couple of different websites that I use to kind of cross-reference against each other and build up a case on that particular product but we'll get into more detail later on in the video. For now that's the topic, thank you for tuning in and let's get straight into it. What is going on then guys? Welcome to my computer. So as you can see then I'm not going to use the facecam for this video just because I want you guys to see absolutely everything I'm doing and number two then this is I'm going to show you pretty much the exact strategy and process I go through when I'm doing my product research. So it might get a bit messy.  So if there is kind of like a specific segment or section that you guys want me to do a more kind of in-depth and detailed video on then drop a comment down below in the comment section and if somebody's already mentioned the same section that you wanted to mention then just make sure you like their comment and if we get like a couple of likes or whatever on a specific section then I can do a video on that no problems at all. So the first kind of method or strategy I want to show you guys is quite an interesting one and I haven't seen anyone else do this on YouTube either so I thought it'd be a good one to show you guys because I always like to put new things out there that you guys find value in essentially and if you do then all I ask is that you hit that like button on this video. So that being said then all you need is a Facebook account and this method you can actually use and it's really powerful and essentially what you do is you get to this screen so I'll show you how you get to this screen. If you click on the arrow on the top right here go down click on settings and then click on ads down here on the left hand side if you can see and it's going to bring you to this screen here and essentially this gives you all the information that is presenting so you can change your ad settings you can hide certain topics etc but for this video what I want to draw your attention to is this your interest section here and please nobody laugh at my interests I don't really use Facebook for personal reasons so all of this stuff is really old that's my excuse anyway so as you can see Avengers 2012 anyway so as you can see there's all these different categories at the top here and one thing I want to point out as well is a lot of people always ask me is when you target a certain interest on Facebook then how does Facebook determine if someone's part of that interest so if you hover over it like this for example you get a little pop up that says you have this preference because you have liked a page related to comedy movies so that's it sounds simple but it's really powerful and you need to understand that because when you target say just like an interest like dogs as just as like a single interest then anybody who's liked a page related to dogs will be included in that interest and that won't necessarily mean that they own a dog and that therefore they probably won't even be interested in your product so just bear that in mind when you're doing your targeting so anyway the key point that I actually wanted to show you guys was if you hover over as you can see it comes up with this c example ads and this is really powerful so if we click on this Facebook is going to give us actual ads that are being ran at this current point in time to do with this interest so as you can see the straight away the first one do not disturb I'm playing fortnite socks and these look like quite a general products and probably on aliexpress as well actually and it gives you the page name as well so we can actually head across to their page and see what kind of other products that advertise in too now as I mentioned in the intro then I want to show you guys how I build up a case and the kind of signs I look for then in a product to tell me that it's actually selling well and then that way it tells me it's worth my time to actually go and experiment and test with so I've got another tab open then if we just head across and try and find these guys so sas party supplies so as this looks like them and as you can see then so it's the very first post on their news feed so this is definitely the same people and what we want to look for then is the kind of the engagement and the comments and the share so as you can see is they're all pretty like quite high figures which is a good sign but that's not good enough for me what I actually want to do now is I'm going to open up the comments and what I'm looking for now is actual intent so people commenting that they've bought this or they want somebody to buy it for them or intent so it's people saying they're going to buy this or they actually want this particular product you need this a gift for the boys xmas prezi xmas prezi sorted a late birth they present so as you can see then these are all pretty strong signs that people have a keen interest in this and we'll actually be going ahead and actually buying this product even better we want to try and find somebody that's actually said they have bought this product because then that tells us like immediately right away that that people actually buying it buy me these please so as you can see you kind of get the idea any questions at all make sure you leave a comment section down below I don't want to make this video too long just scrolling through comments because that will get a bit boring for you guys I'll get you an hour a couple I knew how long is delivery one to three days so these guys might not be dropshipping they might be print on demand these just place my order so there you go so somebody is actually buying these so there's really good strong intent another thing you can do then is when you go on a certain Facebook page you can go on info and ads over here and it's going to tell you the ads that is running so again it gives you product ideas and once you have these products then you can go across and there's a couple of different websites then that you can use to cross reference them so pretty much the first thing I ever do is go straight to aliexpress and try and find the exact product on aliexpress and see what kind of reviews it's got see how many order numbers it has now aliexpress is pretty good at blocking out like specific brand names so if we were to search for fortnight socks then the chances that I probably won't show us anything because they want to stop people selling trademarked items so for example as you can see sorry your search didn't return anything but if we put something like gaming socks then is that the first one so it's the very first product that's actually come up fortnight socks if we let's just fill by orders just to see if it's still there do not disturb on gaming so these are the socks here so 460 orders they're on the top line when you filter by a number of orders so as you can see they're still a really popular product now the order numbers aren't hugely high but 460 still a pretty decent number they've got good reviews as well and a brilliant the brilliant thing about this as well is the fact that you can see exactly what these guys are selling it for so if we were to actually go on to their website in fact i think you mentioned it in their post so all three items for 199 so what they're doing is it is this is a bundle offer so bundle offers then are a great tactic for increase in perceived value now the fact that they're offering shipping within a couple of days probably tells me the fact that they've bought like a like a significant amount of these like a bulk order of them and they're packaging them all together and shipping them out just as like a christmas special thing but anyway that's kind of like tactic number one you guys kind of hopefully get the gist of what i'm doing here so you can go into your ad preferences look up different interests actually see what kind of ads are being ran find them on facebook and then you can kind of start your digging and your research from there then if you want to know the kind of signs you want to look out for then if this particular product is selling well so always go in the comment section so number one thing look for a post that has a good amount of engagement and shares because if it has that shows an interest at least from the audience and then to kind of build on that interest and actually kind of find proof that people are buying this product then always open up the comment section and look at what people are commenting see if anybody's saying they've purchased it and received it a lot of times people will actually come back and leave reviews on the actual post i've shown you guys in previous videos where people have done that for the led dub colors and we'll actually post pictures in the comment section showing people and leaving reviews which is great so if an ad has been around for long enough then no doubt you'll start seeing stuff like that in the comment section and then another couple of ways then that you can go about kind of proving to yourself this product is going to be a winner by showing intent that people are actually buying it so you can use google trends i've shown this in the previous couple of videos but if we were to just put in here something like fortnight now i'm not sure how well whether socks are the kind of specific thing people go looking for but as you can see then the interest over time has increased dramatically now a couple of things to mention with google trends so you can filter by country alone i always recommend leaving that worldwide because what it does is it gives you an interest by region by region so you can see then exactly what countries are essentially building the demand for this product you can set the different timeframes as well fortnight hasn't been around very long so we we can narrow it down to say the past 12 months and the popularity is still growing as well which is still a great sign and then at the bottom you've got the different related queries so this might give us different actual product ideas that we can go ahead and start doing even more research on so that's another way then you can kind of or another sign to look for then if a product is doing well is if this graph is pointing upwards then because that tells us that more and more people then are interested in this product and then another method you can use is if you go on this website here watchcount.com what this does is it has pretty much a record of every single product on ebay and if you put your put your keywords in here so fortnight sucks wait and see what comes up so they're all the same which is good if we just open it up it's going to take us to ebay and what we want to look for now is how many units have actually sold because again so as as that pops up just there 63 sold in the last 24 hours so that is a very very very strong sign that people are buying this product and want to buy this product so if we were to actually go ahead and test this product we know that people are buying it so if they're not buying it from us then it's something we're doing it's either our ad or our audience or our store there's intent there that's guaranteed we know 100 percent as a fact that people are buying this product says it says they're 63 sold in the last 24 hours over nearly 200,000 sold to combined now another thing to mention with with the ebay is the key in decaying factors that you're looking for is you want to make sure that there's more sold than there are people watching because with some products people really like products but they won't actually buy it so they'll just watch it and if you come across a product that has loads and loads of watches but not many buyers then you want to stay away from it because at the end of the day we want hard evidence that people are actually committing and actually buying this particular product and then that way it's going to guarantee to us that it's a winner so moving on then it's got a bit messy so far but hopefully you guys are getting the gist of what's going on here so you can use this method then to find a product find them on facebook look at what they're advertising and then to see if it is selling well find the product on aliexpress look at the order numbers and the reviews you can check on watch counts see if people are actually buying it on ebay put it into google trends as well see if the popularity of the products is actually increasing because that's a really strong sign as well and then there's a couple of other ways as well that i like to find products so this next strategy i'm about to show you guys is great if you've already committed to a niche so if you already built your store out and you're not having much success and you think it's because of the products you're selling then this is a great strategy to use and it's really easy to do so all you do then is put in the name of your niche so gadgets dogs cats or whatever it is so if we just put gadgets as it was there gadgets and follow it by dot my Shopify.com just hit enter and what that's going to do is all of these shops here then are going to be gadget shops that are currently being hosted on Shopify so if we just take this first one as an example now you do always have to check to make sure that it is a drop shipping store now as your experience kind of improves and you kind of get to know like what products especially if you're in that niche already like i know for a fact you can get that product on aliexpress and that product as well so the chances are this is a drop shipping store now what you want to do is you want to filter you want to find their best selling products so there's a couple of ways you can do it you can just go to a specific collection and then usually they'll give you like a filtering option to find out what the best selling is so once that loads so as you can now it's loaded as you can see that's their best selling products within the mobile accessories now if you want to find their all-time best selling products what you want to do is if you go back to their homepage and i've got this piece of url here so just copy that so we'll just copy this we'll go back to the site and what we're going to do is we're just going to literally stick on the end of the homepage url and that's going to give us the best selling products of all time on their site now there are ways of blocking this url so it won't work so if it comes up with like a random page or whatever then it hasn't worked because people can block it but as you can see it has worked on this site and we can see then this is their very best selling product so again that's hard evidence that this is a popular and winning product because it's their best selling so now again you can obviously go across to the other sites i've shown you and look to see if there's even more evidence there but it's just a great starting point of finding products so if we just click on this the reason this is super powerful as well is because the fact that we know it's the best selling products on their site we can see what they're selling it at as well so it's a best selling product at 1099 which means we could probably get away with charging a little bit more than that and still make a decent amount of sales so like i mentioned earlier again you can then take the name of this product go across to aliexpress and find it find it on ebay on watch count again on google trends but i'm not going to go through the process again i don't make the video too long um we're probably pushing already 20 minutes almost and then the third and final method i want to show you guys is one that i use quite a lot in fact is so the way i start was if you go if you just search on google for Shopify space myip.ms then it's this website here so myip.ms browse sites this one here and what this is then what it does is it's going to show us literally absolutely every single store that Shopify is hosting and it does it in order as well in terms of the world site popular rating so pretty much how much traffic it's getting so this is a great way actually of seeing what the biggest stores on Shopify is but another super powerful thing that you can actually do is if you search in here so full slash part website name so again if we want to find say all the biggest dog Shopify stores just put dog in there hit search and as you can see it puts it in the rating it filters it by the rating again so we can see so this one here now not obviously not all these are going to be drop shipping sites but the more you look at the more you'll realize when you start seeing products you can source on AliExpress then you'll know straight away so this is the biggest dog website on Shopify then so this is absolute gold for finding popular products that are actually selling well so when the site pops up like this then it won't let you change the URL so we can't do that URL trick that showed you to find the best seller so what we're going to do then is we're just going to copy this we'll put it in a new tab and if we take this end in here stick this on the end hit enter and hopefully then because it's one of the biggest sites they might have blocked it but to me it doesn't look like they have so as we can see then the chat is that this is all their best selling products so again it gives us another avenue to go down these are more products that we can go and start looking at doing our research on comparing on watch count find the product on aliexpress all the good stuff that i just showed you guys now that being said i think i'm going to wrap the video up there i'm just going to give you guys a quick recap because we did cover quite a lot so find your product using either of the three methods i just showed you so go on facebook look at what your own interests are it's always good to sell products within an interest you're already interested in see the example ads go to their facebook pages and find the products look for the engagement make sure it's got good engagement and if it has then look for the cold hard facts or evidence then that people actually buy in that product so look at the comments make sure you find people who have said they've bought it or they've already bought it they've left a good review or make sure there's a keen interest in people actually buying that particular product and then to make sure there is you can go and watch count find it on ebay always make sure that there's more sold than that is watches because again we want to make sure people are actually buying it look to see how many people have bought it in the last 24 hours so 63 is a really good amount and then you can also go on google trends as well put it in there make sure it's on the upward trend just then that way you know for a fact that people are interested in your product and if not more and more and more people are going to be interested and that means so then guys i think i'm going to wrap the video up there i feel like i've been talking for hours and hours if you're still watching the video then i really do appreciate it really does mean a lot all the people that watch the videos right to the end and it really does help the organic growth of the channel so i really do appreciate you guys and if you're still watching then hopefully you've enjoyed the video if you have please do leave a like again it really does help and contribute towards the growth of the channel and that means so then guys i'm going to wrap the video up there any questions at all by the way then please do make sure to leave a comment down below i always get back to every single person and that being said then thank you for tuning in and i'll see you all in the next one


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Vishwajith Dhar and we are going to talk about the make in India and related to the FDI flows or the foreign direct investment flows to India. Vishwajith you have been studying the issue of FDI flows, make in India and so on. Do you think this make in India slogan has led to greater investments in Indian economy? Study that we are still doing and we just published some preliminary results of this study on FDI. This is an ongoing study that we have and we looked at this period since the make in India was announced in September 2014. Particularly because there have been a number of reports and parliament questions through which there have been claims that make in India has been has been fuelled by FDI flows. So, we tried to understand what the reality is and whether these claims can actually be justified. And we found that there is not much of an evidence that there is a link between FDI inflows and the make in India. There are two things that I think your study seems to show. One is that the bulk of the FDI seem to have come in what are called brownfield investments which is already existing companies being taken over by global capital which does not add to the extra productive capacity in the country. The second is round tripping. Let us discuss the brownfield expansion, brownfield investments first. Do you think that bulk of the capital that is coming is really coming through this route? Let me just take one step behind because lot of people do not understand what this FDI is all about. FDI as we know is the foreign direct investment and why is it so important? Why is the government of India going and making such a pitch for foreign direct investment? This is because foreign direct investment is supposed to be long-term investment as opposed to other forms of investment like foreign portfolio investment or foreign institution investors which just come in the stock market and go away. So, hot money. Hot money and even portfolio investment is short term. So, if India is interested in development and wants development finance it should actually pitch for foreign direct investment. Now, the forms in which FDI gets counted and this is a statistical issue is very interesting. The first is that foreign direct investment has flows that are coming new flows which come from outside and these are what we call the greenfield investments. So, new capacity is formed. So, there is a net addition to the capacity that is already existing in the country. The second component of FDI is what we call brownfield investment. The brownfield investment is basically takeovers like what just you mentioned. Takeover of existing Indian companies by the foreign investors. Now, in case of brownfield investment therefore, there is no net addition to capacity. The ownership of an enterprise changes hands and in most cases, we have found that the foreign investor does not even invest in the existing plant and machinery just takes the existing plant and machinery forward. The third component is very interesting. The third component is what we call retained earnings. Now, the retained earnings are the you know out of the profits that a company earns a part of the profits are distributed to the shareholders as dividends and one part is retained and periodically these retained earnings are capitalized. They are put into the equity capital. They are given to the existing shareholders. So, if there is a foreign company which is making a profit in India, remember if it is making a profit in India, it is making a profit in Indian rupees and once it is capitalized, then it becomes the Indian rupees, then they get converted into foreign liabilities because against those higher equity capital they are going to be higher claims which the foreign investor can make and that can result in higher dividend outflow. So, here you can say that quite reverse is happening. Instead of foreign capital coming into the country, here internal resources can go out of the country. So, these are the two components, the brownfield, the takeovers and retained earnings are becoming larger by the day and our argument is that net capital is not coming in. Other part of your study deals with also export of capital from Indian companies and a lot of that seems to be coming back from tax havens, Mauritius route particularly or Singapore and coming in as if it is foreign investment. Did you find a major significant aspect of the FDIs to be this? Yeah, actually you know see when we talked about round tripping, the first country that comes to our mind is China because we knew for a fact that a large part of the foreign direct investment in China was basically you know those expected Chinese who is to bring in money through the Hong Kong route. Now, that started happening in India. Indian capital is actually going out. There is a lot of outflows taking place now and we are now finding evidence of capital going out of the country, getting parked in one of the Singapore and Mauritius and coming back as foreign direct investment. So, it is a real irony because in an Indian capital once it comes back through the Mauritius or Singapore route then gets counted as foreign capital. And gets preferential treatment? And a very important component of this is our very important part of this is that you know there are these bilateral investment treaties we have with many countries of course now the government has decided to knock off the old agreements and bring in a new framework agreement. So, a foreign investor coming from these jurisdiction then gets protection of the Indian government. If the government of India does not behave itself properly with the foreign investors then the foreign investor can take an Indian government to a private arbitration and this is the investor stated dispute settlement process. So, Indian companies do not have that freedom. Indian companies can not you know take the Indian government to foreign arbitration in Singapore and get them to the cleaners, but the foreign investor has that. So, you can actually see the advantages that there are quite apart from the tax breaks and other advantages and which is the ISDS. The main conclusion is that it is it may not be correct to say that the make in India actually triggered FDI inflows there are many other reasons you know we also pointed out that there are statistical issues RBI has reported in inflow which took place much earlier if you look at the company records during this period. So, there was the actual inflows then took place between 2014 and 2016 that actually took place earlier, but RBI suddenly realized that there was missing link somewhere they had the problem of data. So, they put in the they filled up the gap in this period. So, the numbers went up. So, there are number of things that we have actually worked on to show that you know this tenuous link does exist between FDI and make in India. Last question what is the net inflowing is the net outflow? It is getting done on the negative side now and again this is a question that government have must ask itself that you know of course, when we are hankering for foreign capital we are telling everyone that we are a country which is short of capital. So, if you are a country short of capital why is it that so much of outflows are taking place you know why are we getting a negative balance on the net inflows. So, our argument is that there are purpose incentives for foreigners and that is prompting many you know Indian firms Indian capital to actually move out you know I would not say just now that whether there is a flight of capital, but at the moment we only say that the the net balance on FDI is turning out to be negative. So, two years of make in India we are getting a negative FDI inflow. That is right. That is a very significant statement. Thank you Vishyajit for being with us. We will follow this as your research progresses and check out what are the conclusions you come to in more detail. Thank you very much for being with us. So, all the time we have a news click today.


Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio and let's discuss the ability of vitamin K2 to help increase cardiac output or the ability of your heart to circulate blood. A very exciting study was recently published that essentially showed a 12%, which is very significant, increase in cardiac output after eight weeks on supplemental vitamin K12. And I'll put the abstract of the study up here on the screen. The study was entitled Oral Consumption of Vitamin K2 for eight weeks associated with increased maximal cardiac output during exercise. So in this study, 26 participants, trained athletes essentially, were divided into either a placebo group where they were given a placebo or a control group where they were given either 300 or I believe was 150 milligrams of vitamin K2, 300 milligrams for about four weeks and then 150 milligrams for another four weeks. And they assess cardiac output before the intervention. So at week one essentially or week zero technically, and then again in eight weeks, and they found a 12% increase again in cardiac output, which is very significant. This may increase one's energy level, certainly could increase one's endurance performance or exercise performance, and may also help someone if they have shortness of breath or fatigue with exertion. So this is definitely a very significant finding. Now it's one study, it's a small study, so we can infer too much from it, but certainly very exciting. Now why might it be that vitamin K2 helps? Well vitamin K2 is a part of what's known as the electron transport chain, which is part of the mechanism through which your mitochondria produce energy. Your mitochondria are the energy producing aspects of your cells. So having good mitochondrial function can ensure that you have good energy production in a cellular level via something known as ATP. And of course if your heart muscle has adequate energy, it can output blood and hence the connection to cardiac output. So definitely something to keep in mind if you're trying to increase your heart health, your cardiac output, or potentially your sports or endurance performance. Now the other aspect of this is where can you get vitamin K2 from foods? And unfortunately, and part of the reason why the supplementation with vitamin K2 may have helped is because many people do not eat much in the way of vitamin K2 rich foods. And I'll put a list up here on the screen of foods that are rich in vitamin K2, but you have things like many fermented foods and things like liver. And fermented foods and liver are definitely an important part of a healthy diet and are things that should be incorporated into the diet. But unfortunately many people don't love liver and not everyone eats much in the way of fermented foods. So part of the reason why this group is benefited was because they were a bit deficient in vitamin K2 to begin with. Now what about the question of well I want to use vitamin K2 forever now because it seems to have this benefit should be taken every day. Is there a potential risk of toxicity of overdose? To my knowledge, no. However, I still would not recommend taking a concentrated supplemental dose 300 milligrams, 150 milligrams of vitamin K2 indefinitely, because there may be some unintended negative side effect. Again, I don't know of anything reported in terms of toxicity with vitamin K2. I also have not looked very indefinitely, but as a general rule, I think the most prudent approach is to use a supplement for a few months, try to get yourself up out of the range of being deficient, and then from there trying to rely on food sources. So looking at some of those fermented foods that we outlined a moment ago. Now I sent this study over to my colleague, Dr. Mikey Nelson, who's a brilliant exercise physiologist, because I really wanted to get a way in from someone who is an expert in health, fitness, and exercise physiology. And I'll put his comments in the video here. Hey, what's going on? It's Dr. Mikey Nelson here. I'm actually down in El Padre, Texas. You can kind of see the ocean out there, hence the funniest sunglasses for kiteboarding. But Dr. Ruchio wanted me to comment about the K2 study. And overall, I thought it was like super interesting. So one, that's a pretty big increase in pretty trained individuals. My only quick comment is it would be really nice to see a follow-up study that instead of doing just a pure randomized control trial, which I know is always considered the highest level of evidence, the downside with that is that we don't know what their K2 status was when they enrolled. So it'd be nice if you took a group of people and you said, okay, we're going to look at your K2 status, and then we're going to segment you between a group that's low and a group that maybe is adequate or high, run the performance test on both groups, and see if there's a difference between the two groups. And then what you can do as a follow-up is you could take the group that was low, you could supplement them up to an adequate level, run the performance test again, and see if the supplementation in a group that was low helped, or if you supplement the group that was okay to even a little bit higher level, if that would be beneficial. My guess is that in most studies you need to look at different types of vitamins and minerals that once you get to an adequate level, you usually don't see much of a performance increase at that point. I do some of the research done on zinc, so athletes that were low in zinc, we give them zinc back to an adequate level, they tend to do better. If they were already at a good level, we give them more, they don't tend to get any better. Vitamin D is kind of the same way too. If you're super deficient, we get you back to a good level, you're going to be better. If you're already at a good level and we get you higher with vitamin D, it doesn't seem to confer any other benefits. So again, I'm Dr. Mike Tenelson, and those are my thoughts on the study. And so Dr. Tenelson makes some great points. I think we're definitely on the same page in looking at this study in an exciting manner but also being a bit cautious. And so remember, if you're trying to improve your cardiac output or put in more plain talk, if you're trying to increase your endurance, then supplementation with vitamin K2 and also incorporating K2 foods into your diet may be very helpful. Again, this is only one study, so we can't draw too much from it. Certainly exciting when we see just a basic vitamin cause a pretty significant impact in improving sports or endurance performance. So this is Dr. Ruscio, and I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.


Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. We are going to be continuing with our discussion topics from the book by Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone. In today's episode, we're gonna talk about the nature of beliefs. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret.  It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into our discussion of the nature of beliefs. In previous episodes, we've been touching on these five fundamental truths about trading. Now we're really gonna start to talk about how to properly integrate these truths into your mental system to make them a core belief. Hopefully at this point, you understand these concepts, but understanding a concept is really only the first step of processing and integrating that concept at the functional level to a point where it becomes part of your belief system so it kicks out all the conflicts that may come in contact with that belief. As traders, our minds are not naturally wired to stay in this now moment that we need to be in. This means we have to actively train our minds to think from these perspectives. So in addition to the training of getting our minds to think this way, there might be a number of conflicting beliefs that we have to work through. When you have conflicting beliefs, this is a major issue that will have an effect on sabotaging the best intentions that you have from a mindset standpoint, from a state of mind, when you are trading and staying in that opportunity flow mindset that we need to be in. For example, depending on where you are in your trading journey, you maybe have spent a lot of money learning how to analyze the market or education systems or technical systems or indicators or whatever it is that you have purchased or acquired to start to become a successful trader. And now you have come to understand this concept that we've been talking about in previous episodes that you don't have to know what's going to happen next to make money in the markets. And the reality is that the more you try to know what's going to happen next, that actually works against you in becoming a better and better trader. So what you have is really a direct conflict between your old beliefs and what you thought you needed to become a successful trader and your new understanding of what you don't need to know to actually become a successful trader. So will this new understanding, will it suddenly just take away all the time and the money and the energy that you spent to try to figure out everything that you've learned to this point about the markets? Well, it's really not that easy. And for some it may be, but if you remember in a previous episode, we talked about the relationship between your mind and a set of software code. And we talked about that, some traders may be already be so close to these new perspectives that all they need to do is put a few of the missing pieces, just another line of code to create this aha experience. However, based on the hundreds and thousands of traders that I've interacted with over the year in my experience, I can say that most are not even close to these perspectives at all. So if you haven't fully grasped this concept, then it might take a considerable amount of mental work to get over these hurdles, to properly integrate this new understanding about trading into your mental environment. Now, here's the good news. Here in a couple of episodes, we're actually gonna go over some exercises that will help install these five fundamental truths of trading that we've been talking about and help you potentially resolve these internal conflicts that you may have to get over that hump that's going to get you on that path to becoming a better trader. All right, so let's jump into this concept of the origins of your beliefs. Now, there's two questions. One, do you know the origin of your beliefs and how can this make you a better trader? How can this make you a more consistently successful trader? Now, some of the things that we talk about here, we're going deep in your belief system and it might sound a little kind of woofoo to you. If you haven't done a lot of mindset trading, this might seem so abstract and like it doesn't even relate, but I promise you, if you can internalize some of these concepts that we talk about, it really is going to help you become a better trader. So let's jump in. So in previous episodes, we kind of lump together three mental components. Number one, that memories, distinctions and beliefs do not exist as physical matter. Okay, we talked about that. Number two, that the cause and effect relationship that exists between ourselves and the external environment brings these components into existence. And then the third piece is how the cause and effect relationship reverses so that we can perceive in the external environment what we have learned about. So previously we kind of bundled those all together. Now, to get to the origins of our beliefs, we really have to unbundle those three components and talk about the difference between a memory and a belief. So one of the best ways to do this is think about ourselves as if we have the mind of a newborn, of an infant, right? I would like to think at the beginning of every child's life, the memories or your experiences would exist in the purest form. And by that I mean the memories of what you've seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted exist in the mind as pure sensory information. So it's not organized or attached to any specific words or concepts because you haven't learned those words or concepts yet. Therefore, let's define your pure memory as sensory information that's stored in its original form. So a belief, on the other hand, is a concept about the nature of the way the external environment expresses itself. So if we combine this pure sensory information and link it to a symbol or system, we call that language, right? So for example, most infants have a pure memory of how it feels to be nurtured by their mother. But it isn't until that infant is taught to link or associate certain words with that pure sensory information that's stored in your memory that you'll form kind of a concept about how it feels to be nurtured by a mother. In the book Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas talks about an example and he says, okay, think about this phrase. Life is wonderful, okay? That's kind of just a concept, right? By themselves, the words make up kind of a meaningless collection of letters, right? Or symbols, but if a child is either taught or decides to connect these words to his positively charged feelings of being nurtured, then the letters are no longer a collection of abstract symbols and words and it's no longer an abstract phrase. The phrase life is wonderful actually becomes a definitive distinction about the nature of existence or the way that the world works. On the flip side, let's say this child didn't get nurtured or didn't get enough nurturing relative to his or her needs. He could just as easily link this feeling of emotional pain to a concept like life isn't fair or the world is an awful place. In any case, when the positive or negative energy from our memories or experiences become linked to a set of words that we call a concept, then the concept becomes energized and we actually feel this and it's transformed into a belief and it's the nature of our reality. So if you consider that these concepts are structured by the framework of the language that we speak and they're energized by the experiences that we have in relation to them, then it becomes pretty clear why we can talk about these beliefs as a structured energy. So of course we all have beliefs, right? We're constantly expressing our beliefs, both vocally, verbally and through our actions. We are constantly interacting with other people's beliefs as they express them. So think about this, if I asked you what exactly does a belief do? Well, you'd probably have a kind of a blank stare on your face and not really know how to answer that. But if I asked you, what's the function of your eyes?  You would have no problem answering since beliefs are such an important component part of our makeup. They're also one of the least thought about or understood. And what I mean by that is, let's say you have a problem with your nose or your ear. Well, we're naturally gonna focus our attention on that part, on that body part and think about what we need to do to fix that issue. If you have an earache, you're gonna be focusing on that. Hey, you're gonna have pain, you're gonna want it to go away, so you're gonna be focusing on that and trying to fix that problem. However, it doesn't necessarily occur to us that the problems we may be having with the quality of our lives, let's say we're, we have a lack of happiness or we're depressed, these are also rooted in our beliefs. One of the dominant characteristics of beliefs is that they make what we experience seem pretty self-evident and really beyond question. I mean, think about this, if you didn't have this intense desire to experience consistent profitability as a trader, then you probably would not be listening to this podcast at all. And usually it takes years of extreme frustration before people really begin to examine their beliefs as the source of the issue with their trading. So even though our beliefs are a real intricate part of our identity, you don't have to take that personally. In other words, consider the fact that none of us were born with any of our beliefs. They were all acquired in a combination of ways, both through our DNA and through our external environment. And many of the beliefs that we have that really have a profound impact on our lives were not even acquired by us freely, right? They were kind of imposed on us or they were instilled on us by other people. So it probably won't come as any surprise to anyone that usually the beliefs that cause us the most difficulty, that create the most conflict were the ones that were actually acquired from others without our conscious consent. And the way I said that may have kind of created a little bit of a negative connotation, but it wasn't out of ill intent. I mean, our parents were trying to do the best they could. They were trying to instill the best belief system that they thought possible to us, but maybe it was in conflict with our natural way of thinking. And we're too young or uninformed to realize the negative implications of what we were being taught at that time. As an example, we see it all the time where you see parents forcing their kids to go to school, get good grades because you've got to go to college to become a doctor.  And a lot of these parents put an extreme amount of pressure on their kids to do specific things because they believe that that is the best thing for their kids. And that's why you'll see a lot of these people who have become doctors or become lawyers and they're extremely unhappy because that's not really what they wanted. They wanted to go to LA and try to be an actor or they wanted to be a trader or they wanted to be an athlete, but yet the force or the instillment of these beliefs from their parents when they were very young and didn't have really a say in what they were taking in can create a very significant impact in the conflicts that they have later on in life. We've all heard the saying, you are what you eat. Well, I think a more appropriate saying is you are what you think. If you think I work hard, but I always have money problems, then guess what? You are always going to be the person who works hard but always has money problems. But if you think money is abundant and money is easily acquired, then you're going to get an abundance of money and it will seemingly come easy.  You've heard the old adage, the harder I work, the luckier I get. Well, that's true too, but on the mental side, you know, it's these positive affirmations. It's the way that they think that almost tricks the mind into doing whatever it is they want. When you look at positive affirmations and the impact that that can have on you, it's pretty incredible. And there's really kind of four steps to that and this is going off the beaten path of what Mark Douglas talks about in his book, but you know, these positive affirmations, you know, if you first start thinking positively about what you want instead of the negative way to think about what you want, it can have a profound impact on what actually happens. And so the first step is you have to start thinking in these positive affirmations as opposed to negative affirmations. Once you start thinking about it on a consistent basis, then you'll start to feel the positive affirmations and once you start to feel that way, then you can start to speak in positive affirmations and when you think and you feel and you speak in positive affirmations, then your internal system will start to actually believe these positive affirmations. And so that's why I say you can kind of trick your mind into doing whatever it is you want, but if you send out into the universe these negative affirmations, the universe is going to send back these exact same negative thoughts and feelings that you're sending out. In the broadest sense, our beliefs shape the way we experience our lives. As we just talked about, we're not born with any of our beliefs. They are acquired and as they accumulate, we live our lives in a way that reflects what we have learned to believe. Think about how different your life would be if you'd been born into a culture or a religion or a political system that has very little, if anything, in common with the one that you were born into in real life. It might be kind of hard to imagine, but what would you have learned to believe about the nature of life and how the world works? It may be remotely similar to what you currently believe, yet you would hold these other beliefs with the same degree of certainty as your current beliefs. That's what cracks me up about these different religions who they all think they're right and they all have this steadfast faith, but yet, isn't it interesting how a lot of people who grew up in China, for example, are Buddhist and so they think that's right because that's how they grew up. A lot of people in the US grew up as Christians or Catholics or whatever it is and so they are just determined to let everybody know that they're the ones that are right. Well, those are the belief systems that you acquired over time and so that's what you believe and it doesn't necessarily mean that you are right. There's really four ways that beliefs shape our lives. They manage our perception and they're in our interpretation of the environment information in a way that's consistent with what we believe. Number two, they create our expectations. Keep in mind as we talked about before, an expectation is a belief projected into some future moment. Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment. Number three, anything we decide to do or expression of behavior will be consistent with what we believe. And number four, finally, our beliefs shape how we feel about the results of our actions. There really isn't much about the way we function that our beliefs don't play a major role in. In one of Mark Douglas's other books, The Disciplined Trader, he wrote about an example that talks about, I think it was a game show that he watched back in like 1987. It was called Gotcha Chicago and it was about some local celebrities who played practical jokes on one another. And in this episode, they basically hired a guy to go downtown Chicago and stand on the Michigan Avenue, the busiest street in downtown Chicago with a sign that said, free money today only. So think about that. You're walking downtown in Chicago, people are everywhere and you come across a guy that says, with a sign that says, free money today only, what would you do? I mean, surely everybody just mobbed this guy and tried to get free money from him, right? The reality was, it was the exact opposite. Only one person went up to the guy and all he asked for was a quarter so that he could get on a bus. Otherwise, no one would even go near this guy. In fact, you would see people actually go around and cross the street just to avoid this guy. This guy's one of those crazy guys. I don't wanna even come in contact with him. I'm just gonna stay away. And eventually this actor, the guy with the sign, he grew really frustrated and started yelling, don't you want any money? Please take my money. I can't give it away fast enough. And he'd run up to people and say, would you like some money? And people would say, no, not today. And they would scurry off and try to get away from the guy as quickly as they could. So why wouldn't anyone ask for money? Why wouldn't anyone accept the money? If we assume that most of all of our, all these passerbys could read the sign but still didn't make any effort to get the money, then one possible explanation for their behavior is that they just didn't care about money. Well, we know that that's pretty unlikely considering how much of our lives is devoted to acquiring wealth or the pursuit of money. And the reason is, is because most people have a belief that free money doesn't exist. If free money really doesn't exist, then how can you consciously or even subconsciously relate to the fact that somebody has a sign giving away free money? In your mind, you're automatically going to dismiss that that's real. Your mind is going to go somewhere else and say things like, well, this guy is just crazy. Or the reasoning process that might go on in your mind is that saying something like, everyone knows getting money with no strings attached rarely happens. Certainly not from a stranger on one of the busiest streets in the city. In fact, if the man were really going to give away money, he would already be mobbed and robbed and all the money would be gone, right? So think about every component of your thought process that's described is consistent with the belief that free money doesn't exist. The words free money, they were neither perceived or interpreted as they were intended from the environment's perspective. Deciding the person with the sign might be crazy, creating an expectation of danger or at least a perception that caution was warranted. For the people who kind of walked out of their way just to get away from that person to avoid that person with the sign, it's an action that is consistent with the expectation of potential danger. But the beliefs that prompt any particular state of mind may not be the truth with respect to the possibilities available from the environment's perspective. Let's think about a hypothetical example of someone who believes that in this concept, like most people, free money doesn't exist, but takes kind of a what if approach to the situation. In other words, some people can get so intrigued and curious about the possibilities that they decide to temporarily suspend their belief that free money does not exist. So this temporary suspension allows them to act outside the boundaries created by a belief in order just, let's just see what happens kind of thing. So instead of ignoring this guy on the street with the sign, which would be our hypothetical person's first inclination, he walks up to him and says, give me $10. The man promptly pulls out a $10 bill, puts it in his pocket and gives it to him. Now, what happens now? How does he feel having experienced something unexpected that completely contradicted his belief? For most people, the belief that free money doesn't exist is acquired through unpleasant circumstances.  Money doesn't grow on trees. You have to work hard to get money. And all the things that we know or have heard or believe about money growing up. In other words, it's probably a negatively charged belief. So the experience of having money handed to him with no strings attached without any negative comments, it would likely create kind of a state of just pure joy, right? In fact, most people would be so happy that they'd feel compelled to share that happiness with everyone that they saw that day. You're not gonna guess what happened to me. But the fact that most people believe money doesn't exist, you know, a lot of people are probably not gonna even believe the story that he tries to tell them. So let's take this example just one step further and imagine what would happen to this person's state of mind if it occurred to him that he could have asked for more money, right? He only asked for $10, what if he would have asked for $100 or $1,000 or even more? So he's in the state of pure elation. However, the moment that either the thought pops into his mind or somebody who relates to his story offers the idea that he could have asked for a lot more money, his state of mind is going to immediately shift to a negatively charged state of regret or despair. And why is this? He tapped into a negatively charged belief about what it means to miss out on something or not get enough. As a result, instead of being happy over what he got, he might kind of begrudgingly be down about what he could have had but didn't get. And to apply this example to trading, I mean, think about that's why fear of missing out hurts almost worse than a loss, right? If you have a losing trade and you're following your rules and it's just part of the process and you have a losing trade, that's not that big of a deal. But I think what hurts emotionally even more is when you knew you should have gotten in a trade and you didn't get filled or you didn't get in or whatever or you just sat there like a deer in the headlights and the price moved exactly how you thought it would and you missed out on that trade, that's even more painful than actually taking a loss sometimes. So in all of these examples, including the hypothetical one that we just talked about, everybody experienced their own unique version of the situation. If you ask them, each one of these people would have described what he or she experienced from their perspective as if it were the only true and valid version of the reality of that situation. The contradiction between all these versions that they tell of the truth suggests that a much larger philosophical issue that needs to be resolved. If beliefs limit our awareness of the information being generated by the physical environment, by the external environment so that we perceive what is consistent with whatever we believe, then how do we know what the truth is? If we're going to answer this question, we have to really consider four different things. Number one, the environment can express itself in an infinite combination of ways. When you combine all the forces of nature interacting with everything created by humans, then add that to the forces generated by all the possible ways that people can express themselves. The result is a number of possible versions of reality that would surely overwhelm even the most open-minded person, right? Number two, until we have acquired the ability to perceive every possible way with where the environment can express itself, our belief will always represent a limited version of what is possible from the environment's perspective. And this makes our beliefs a statement about reality, but not necessarily a definitive statement of reality. Number three, if you find yourself taking exception to the second statement, then consider that if our beliefs are true, you know, if a 100% accurate reflection of physical reality, then our expectation would always be fulfilled, right? If our expectations were always fulfilled, then we would be in a perpetual state of satisfaction, but that's just not the case. How could we feel anything other than happy or joyful or related with a complete sense of wellbeing if physical reality was consistently showing up exactly as we expected it to? Well, we know that's not reality, right? And then number four, if you can accept the third statement as being valid, then the corollary is also true. If we are not experiencing satisfaction, then we must be operating out of a belief or beliefs that don't work very well relative to the environmental conditions. So if you take these four components, these four ideas into consideration, now you can answer what is the truth? The answer is whatever works. If beliefs impose limitations on what we perceive as possible and the environment can express itself in an infinite combination of ways, then beliefs can only be true relative to what we are attempting to accomplish at any given moment. In other words, the relative degree of truth inherent in our beliefs can be measured by how useful they are. Every one of us has internally generated forces that compel or motivate us to interact with the physical environment. You see, the particular set of steps that we take to fulfill the object of our curiosity or our needs or wants or desires or our goals or whatever it is, it's all a function of what we believe to be true in any given circumstance or situation. And that truth, whatever it is, is going to determine, number one, the possibilities we perceive in relation to what is available from the environment's perspective. Number two, it's going to determine how we interpret what we perceive. Number three, it's gonna determine the decisions that we make. Number four, it will determine our expectations of the outcome. It's going to determine the action we take and it's gonna determine how we feel about the results of our effort. If we find ourselves in a state of satisfaction or happiness or wellbeing in relation to whatever it is we are attempting to accomplish, we can say that our truth, meaning whatever beliefs we are operating from, are useful because the process worked. What we perceived was not only consistent with our objective, it was also consistent with what was available from the environment's perspective. Because if what we did or what we believed to happen and it actually came true, there was no resistance or conflict or forces from the outside environment. And therefore there was no conflict in our mind that would diminish the outcome of what we're trying to achieve. As a result, we find ourselves in a state of this happiness, this satisfaction. On the other hand, if we find ourselves in a state of disappointment or dissatisfaction or frustration, we can say that relative to the environmental situation and circumstance, the beliefs we're operating from don't work at all or therefore they're not useful. Simply put, the truth is a function of whatever works in relation to what we are trying to accomplish at any given moment. All right, so that's the end of this episode. In the next episode, we're gonna take the nature of these beliefs and the impact of beliefs and we're really gonna tie it into the trading. I know in this episode, we kind of went out and did a lot of hypotheticals and talked about our belief systems, but next episode, we're really gonna tie it into the impact of our beliefs on trading. If you're interested in joining a community of like-minded traders, just go to community.navigation trading.com, it's free to join. We call it the trade hacker community and there is hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff that we talk about here, but also sharing trade ideas and the sole purpose of helping each other become successful traders. So we look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.