What the Chicago Pits Taught Me About Conviction Under Fire VIEW IN BROWSER I had just graduated from the University of Miami — sun still on my skin, confidence in my step — and Chicago was calling louder than any beach could. I wasn’t chasing an office job with a cubicle and a steady paycheck. I wanted the real thing — the noise, the chaos, the chance to test myself in the fire. So I walked into the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the first time that summer. The smell hit me first: sweat, paper, and burnt coffee. Then the sound. A wall of voices shouting bids and offers, phones ringing, bells clanging. Paper tickets flew through the air like confetti. It was a storm in every sense of the word. I was just 22 years old, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men two and three times my age who had been trading longer than I’d been alive. I was nervous and my tie was a little too tight, but I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be. I didn’t know it then, but those first steps onto the floor would shape everything that came after. That was where I learned what really separates traders who survive from traders who wash out. That’s where I learned The Trader’s Mindset. | Recommended Link | | | | This powerful strategy, developed and perfected by Jonathan Rose, can give readers the chance to capture huge pay days in any market condition. And soon, he’s going to release 3 brand new trades that could make you 500% or more, over the coming weeks. Learn how you can get these three new trades before it’s too late… Please watch this before the markets open next. |  | | Building Our Framework Even when you think you’re ready for the challenge, you find out quickly that there’s still a lot left to learn. Any trader can catch a lucky break here and there, but on the floor you can’t survive on luck alone. You need process. You need conviction. You need discipline. These are the core principles traders fall back on when the waves come crashing in that keep us calm, cool and collected. It all starts with process. If you can’t explain why you’re in a trade, you don’t belong in it. This isn’t a gut feeling we get from some squiggly lines on a chart, we’re on the hunt for objective reasons to believe that an asset is mispriced. This can take a lot of forms. Sometimes it’s as simple as following some unusual options activity (UOA), or spotting mispriced earnings volatility. Maybe we find a divergence between two highly correlated assets. We’ve also had success with special situations like KTOS and combat drones, QXO consolidating the retail building supply space, and more recently with mispriced stocks like BMNR with large Ethereum holdings. But even the most thorough process doesn’t spare you from the ups and downs of the market. Nothing moves up or down in straight lines. A trade can look perfect on paper and not go the way you expected. That’s where conviction steps in. It’s the belief born from research and preparation that allows us to remain confident when things don’t go as planned. Without conviction, process is just theory. While conviction is what carries us through the rough patches, it’s even better if you can avoid those patches altogether. That’s where discipline comes in. Discipline is about setting the rules of the trade before you even put in your first offer. I’ve seen plenty of sharp traders self-destruct. And in every case, they would make the same mistakes… They would rely too heavily on technical analysis. They let excitement push them into chasing hot trades and oversized bets. They would micromanage their portfolios. They would break their own rules. In the long run, the market will punish you for that kind of recklessness. Discipline is the patience to wait for your setup, even when the market feels dull and your inner voice is screaming for action. Discipline is what creates consistency. It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t get applause — but it’s the framework that allows us to fine-tune our approach to the markets. Without it, you’re just swinging at every pitch that comes your way. With it, you’re ready to defend the strike zone and stay at the plate long enough to capitalize on the right opportunity. That discipline, consistency and patience is exactly what I teach to my Masters in Trading community. It’s all part of the singular strategy that we leverage to systematically track hidden stock plays with confidence and pair them with a simple tweak that can multiply the payoff on great stock ideas. I recently went live to discuss exactly how this system works with The Profit Surge Event. It’s a special webinar designed to give you the tools and insights to trade with conviction and process – while avoiding market noise. You can learn all about the system – and the key stock picks I’m watching – right here. Now that you have a better understanding of the trader’s mindset, let’s take a look at one real world example that brings it all together. Process in Action I’ll take you through our recent Lyft (LYFT) trade step by step. It’s a clean example of how process, conviction, and discipline all come together. Back in July, we took aim at Lyft Inc. The company was getting set to release its next earnings report on August 6. We came into earnings with a simple observation: the options market was underpricing the move. The straddle was implying around a 16% swing, but Lyft’s history told us the stock typically moved closer to 20% after earnings. Even better, we also saw that behind its top competitor UBER, which gave us conviction that LYFT still had room to catch up. That’s the edge. We weren’t guessing. We weren’t saying, “Hey, I think ridesharing is hot.” We were playing the math and had multiple reasons to believe that LYFT had potential to move. With catalyst events like an earnings release, we never know for certain whether the stock will go up or down. So, instead of making a directional play, we trade the volatility. In this case we structured the trade as a straddle. That’s when you buy calls (bullish) and puts (bearish) on the same strike price designed to expire at the same time. This way, we didn’t need to worry which way Lyft would break. We just needed it to move more than the market was pricing. Discipline Over Emotion Then earnings hit. Lyft sold off on the news, but not far enough outside of the market maker’s expectations. In this case that meant we were able to take profits on our puts, but it wasn’t enough to cover the total cost of the strangle. Meanwhile the calls were close to worthless, which put us in a tight spot. 
A lot of traders see red on one side of their trade and panic. It would be easy to cash them out, then to try and preserve capital while clawing back some more premium. But as a general rule, we never want to sell an option for less than $0.20. Even if we did, we would still be underwater on this trade. On the flip side, we could hold onto the calls and see if shares recovered in the nine days before expiration. The situation didn’t look good, but this is where conviction and discipline come into play. We knew the research. Sure, the earnings catalysts didn’t pan out. But that wasn’t our only reason to believe LYFT could move to the upside. That conviction in the trade and the discipline in our approach kept us from second-guessing the setup when the stock went against the calls. Conviction Rewarded And then, right at the last minute, the payoff came. On Friday, August 15th, LYFT started moving after announcing its co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer were stepping down from the board next year. That meant their Class B shares would soon turn into common stock, killing the dual-class structure and bringing our calls back from the brink. As a result, shares jumped more than 10% and brought our calls back in the money. All told, the straddle returned around 5%. It was a minor win built on process, conviction, and discipline. But it didn’t end for us there… Soon after LYFT’s stock run, I saw yet another opportunity to turn LYFT’s short pop into a fresh win. I told my Advanced Notice viewers to go all in on the LYFT October calls at the end of August. In just two weeks, we netted over 200% from that short run in the stock. Both trades on LYFT came from the same approach… We didn’t chase. We didn’t guess. We didn’t let emotions drive the bus. We found a setup with edge, trusted the research, and managed risk with discipline. That’s the trader’s mindset in action — and that’s how you stay alive long enough to hit the big ones. This isn’t the only comeback story we’ve seen over the last year. We saw rallies in IWM, AA and RUN over the last few months. They looked all but lost only to rebound and take what looked like surefire losers into the green. It’s the same story with two recent wins that looked to have completely run out of steam for us – Antero Resources and Coterra Energy. It wasn’t easy sticking with our bullish stance on these clean energy stocks throughout 2025. Government-sparked headwinds broadly sent clean energy stocks into a tailspin for much of the year. But with both trades, our goal was getting long exposure. And luckily for us, we never wavered in our conviction with these trades. Our bets on these stocks paid off with gains of more than 90% and 145%. The lesson in all of these trades is simple: don’t mistake short-term noise for a verdict on your trade. If your process is sound and your discipline is intact, you don’t have to flinch when a position goes red. The market will test you — it always does. It’s about trusting the framework you’ve built, leaning on conviction when the waves hit, and letting discipline decide the exit. Train Your Mind to Think Like a Pro The truth is, no one is born with the trader’s mindset. It isn’t some gift you’re handed when you open a brokerage account or read a book. It’s forged in the fire of real-world trading decisions — like the ones we just walked through with Lyft. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to spend years on a trading floor to build it. I spent years uncovering where the big money is getting in position before the crowd figures it all out. All that knowledge is exactly what I teach in Masters in Trading. And I want everyone who’s eager to listen to have that same knowledge. The kind that gets you a beat on the biggest opportunities before they hit most investors’ radars. That’s why I recently went live with my “Trade of the Decade” at The Profit Surge Event. Not only that, but during that presentation, I showed viewers exactly how to systematically track picks from my InvestorPlace colleagues – Louis Navellier, Eric Fry, and Luke Lango – and pair them with a simple tweak that can multiply the payoff on great stock ideas. This is the same approach we’ve used all year to stay ahead of massive shifts in precious metals, commodities, tech stocks, and much more. While everyone else was reacting to headlines, we were positioning where the real money is flowing. All based on discipline and conviction. And all without paying any attention to the short-term noise that shakes most investors’ confidence. During this special event, I show you how to get ahold of my Trade of the Decade… plus three more trades that I believe could be home runs based on my market forecast and Unusual Options Activity. You can watch a full replay of our special event for a limited time. Remember, the creative trader wins, | 
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