Almost six years later, I think the chart was probably the easier part. Maybe not just think. I know it now.

I’ve started thinking that trading is basically an environment designed to expose parts of human nature that are much easier to hide in normal life. There is money involved, there is uncertainty, there is competition, there is instant feedback and, most importantly, there is nobody standing behind you telling you what to do. You are completely free to make good decisions, but you are just as free to make unbelievably stupid ones, and eventually you will.

After enough years in the markets, I’ve noticed that most of those bad decisions seem to come from the same places.

I - Your Emotions Are Faster Than Your Rules

Ask someone after a revenge trade whether revenge trading is a good idea and obviously they’ll tell you no. Ask someone who risked three times more than usual whether increasing risk because you’re angry is intelligent and they’ll probably laugh at the question. The problem is that those traders really don’t know what they did wrong.

I’ve experienced this myself more times than I’d like to admit. You take a loss that annoys you more than usual, another setup appears shortly after and somehow it looks much better than it would’ve looked twenty minutes earlier. Maybe you loosen one rule slightly, maybe you increase risk because you’re “very confident,” or maybe you take something that isn’t really your setup but is close enough that your brain can build a decent argument for it.

Your brain is extremely good at creating logical explanations for emotional decisions, and by the time you realize what happened, the decision has already been made. That’s why I don’t think the goal is to remove emotion from trading, because I don’t think that’s realistic.

There is a huge difference between feeling something and obeying it.

You can be frustrated and still follow your rules. You can be afraid and still take the setup. You can feel extremely confident and still keep your risk exactly where it was yesterday. That’s probably what emotional control actually looks like in trading - not becoming emotionless, but refusing to let a temporary feeling make permanent decisions with your money.

II - Trading Is a Status Game

I think social media made this one significantly worse.

Trading used to be mostly private. You made money, you lost money and unless you worked on a trading floor, relatively few people knew what happened. Now your results can become part of your identity, and once that happens the game changes completely. People post payouts, funded accounts, withdrawals, monthly returns, cars, watches and screenshots of trades that somehow always seem to catch the exact top or bottom.

After watching enough of it, you naturally start comparing yourself, even if you tell yourself you don’t care. Someone has a bigger account, someone made more this month, someone has been trading for less time than you and appears to be doing better, and someone your age is supposedly making in a day what you make in a month. Even if you don’t consciously play that game, some part of your brain still keeps score.

I’ve felt this myself because I’ve shared trading online for years. There were periods where I could tell that trading wasn’t completely private anymore. A losing period didn’t only mean I was losing money; somewhere in the back of my mind there was also this feeling that I was supposed to be a good trader because thousands of people were watching me talk about trading.

That’s a dangerous place to operate from because the moment you need trading to prove something about you, individual trades start carrying responsibilities they were never supposed to have. A trade shouldn’t prove that you’re intelligent, a profitable month shouldn’t prove that you’re successful, and a payout shouldn’t prove that the last five years of your life were worth it.

It’s just a trade.

I think one of the healthiest things you can do is separate your actual trading from the status game surrounding trading.

III - Losing Changes the Next Decision

I’ve always found it interesting that one losing trade can completely change how someone treats the next one, even if the second setup is objectively identical.

You could execute the exact same setup twice with the exact same risk, but if the second trade comes immediately after a painful loss, suddenly it doesn’t feel like the same decision anymore. Now there is history attached to it. Maybe you want the money back, maybe you hesitate because you don’t want to lose twice, maybe you increase risk because winning the normal amount wouldn’t recover enough, or maybe you skip a perfectly valid setup because you simply don’t want to see another red number.

The previous trade is over, but psychologically you’re still trading it.

This is probably one of the hardest things to genuinely understand about probability. Independent decisions don’t care about the story you’ve created around them. The market doesn’t know that you’re down for the week, your setup doesn’t suddenly have a higher chance of winning because the previous five lost, and the next loss isn’t more meaningful just because you’ve already had a terrible month.

I’ve had periods in trading where understanding this became extremely important. When I went through thirty-six losses in a row, there was eventually no way to make each individual result emotionally significant because if I had done that, I would’ve completely lost my mind. The only reason I could continue executing was because I had years of manually collected data behind what I was doing and understood that my responsibility was the quality of the decision, not the result of a single trade.

That experience changed how I look at losses.

I still don’t enjoy losing money. I don’t think anybody genuinely does. But a loss doesn’t automatically mean something needs fixing, and sometimes you did everything correctly and simply lost. That’s one of the hardest things for traders to accept because our brains desperately want every bad outcome to have a cause we can control.

Sometimes there isn’t one.

IV - You Become What You Consume

This is something I only fully understood after I stopped consuming trading content.

I haven’t watched trading content regularly for years now, and I honestly think that helped my trading much more than finding another YouTube channel ever could. When you’re a beginner, learning from other people is obviously useful because you don’t know anything yet, but the problem starts when consuming information becomes your default state and you never reach the point where you trust your own work.

If you spend your morning watching five different traders explain what NASDAQ is going to do, those opinions don’t simply disappear when you open your platform. Someone is bullish, someone expects a crash, someone found a level you’ve never considered and someone says your entire way of looking at the market is wrong. Then your own setup appears and you’re supposed to make an objective decision while carrying ten other people’s opinions inside your head.

I don’t want that anymore.

At this point, I would rather look at my own data and be wrong than borrow somebody else’s conviction and be right. Trading became much quieter once I stopped caring about what everybody else was doing because I know what I’m looking for, I know the conditions under which I trade and I have enough historical data to understand roughly what I should expect over time.

I don’t need another opinion every morning. I highly recommend you to do the same.

Bless you all.

- Luke

Maybe you lost an account you spent months working toward. Maybe you’re deep in a drawdown and questioning a strategy you previously trusted. Or maybe nothing dramatic happened at all. You simply looked at the last few months and realized that somewhere along the way, you stopped trusting yourself.

I know this feeling pretty well.

I reached full allocation at FTMO and at one point managed more than $600,000 in funded capital. Then I lost it. Looking back, getting there taught me a lot about trading, but losing it and having to rebuild taught me much more about myself.

When things are going well, there is very little reason to question what you’re doing. When they stop going well, you’re forced to look at the foundations underneath your results.

If I had to rebuild again, this is where I would start.

Start With the Trader You Don’t Want to Become

Most traders know what they want: profitability, larger accounts, regular payouts, financial freedom. The problem is that these goals tell you surprisingly little about what you should actually do tomorrow.

Instead, imagine yourself three years from now and nothing has changed. You still switch strategies whenever a drawdown becomes uncomfortable. You increase risk when things are going well and become afraid to execute when they’re not. A winning week makes you think you’ve figured trading out, while a losing week sends you searching for something new.

You’ve accumulated another three years of experience, but you’re still fighting the same problems.

This is essentially inversion: rather than only asking what creates success, think about what would almost guarantee failure and work backwards from there.

Write down the characteristics of the trader you never want to become, then look honestly at how many of those behaviors you’re already practicing.

Your future probably won’t be determined by one huge decision. It will be determined by hundreds of small behaviors repeated until they become normal.

Rebuild Self-Trust

After a difficult period, most traders desperately want their confidence back. So they backtest more, add confirmations, watch more analysis or change something about their strategy.

Sometimes that’s necessary. Other times, you’re simply trying to remove uncertainty.

The problem is that uncertainty never disappears.

You can backtest 2,000 trades and the next setup can still lose. You can have six profitable months and the seventh can still be negative.

This is why I think self-trust matters more than confidence.

Confidence is believing the next trade will work. Self-trust is knowing that whether it wins or loses, you’ll execute it according to your plan.

You rebuild that through very ordinary decisions. You stop after your maximum number of trades. You take the next valid setup after several losses. You miss a winner and don’t chase it. You have a great week and don’t suddenly double your risk.

None of this looks impressive, but every time your actions match what you previously decided, you give yourself another reason to trust your own word.

Turn Your Worst Period Into Data

Your worst trading periods contain some of the best information you’ll ever get about yourself.

Instead of immediately trying to forget them, study them.

Separate losses that were simply part of your strategy from losses caused by your decisions. Then look for patterns. Maybe boredom makes mediocre setups look acceptable. Maybe confidence makes you increase risk. Maybe fear makes you skip trades. Maybe after several losses you suddenly start consuming far more trading content and questioning everything.

This is where journaling becomes useful.

Writing “I was frustrated today” doesn’t tell you much. Understanding what frustration consistently makes you do does.

One mistake might mean nothing. The same mistake appearing repeatedly under similar conditions is a pattern, and once you see the pattern, you can build rules around it.

The expensive mistakes aren’t necessarily the biggest ones. They’re the ones you keep paying for without learning anything from them.

Make Trading Smaller Again

When traders decide they’re going to rebuild, they usually do more. More backtesting, more charts, more markets, more journaling, more hours.

I would probably do the opposite.

One market. One or two setups. Fixed risk. A defined trading window. A simple journal and a review process you can realistically maintain.

Every additional decision creates another opportunity to negotiate with yourself. Should I take another trade? Increase risk? Close early? Trade another session? Move the stop?

Good rules remove those decisions before emotions get involved.

When you’re rebuilding, you don’t need the most sophisticated trading system possible. You need something simple enough that you can prove to yourself you’re capable of executing consistently.

Build Evidence Before You Build Size

Losing something you’ve already had creates a strange psychological problem. If you once traded $400,000, trading $10,000 feels meaningless. Your reference point has changed, so rebuilding slowly feels like going backwards.

Forget your previous peak for a while.

Start collecting evidence again.

Twenty properly executed trades. Then fifty. Then one hundred.

Not one hundred winners. One hundred decisions you can look back on and defend.

Track your execution, rule violations, emotional interference and whether live results roughly resemble what your testing suggested you should expect.

Increasing size should eventually become a boring decision supported by evidence, not an emotional attempt to get back to where you used to be.

The Rebuild Is Usually Boring

People imagine a comeback as a dramatic moment where everything suddenly clicks again.

Trading rarely works like that.

Your comeback might simply be 30 trades executed according to plan. Keeping the same risk through a losing streak. Closing the platform when your session ends. Not touching your strategy because of one ugly month.

Then eventually you notice something.

Losses still annoy you, but they don’t change your behavior. Winning streaks feel good, but they don’t make you reckless. Missing a trade doesn’t ruin your session.

If you’re currently going through a period where it feels like you’ve moved backwards, don’t rush to escape it. Study what happened, simplify what you’re doing and start building evidence again.

You just need enough ordinary days where you do what you said you were going to do that eventually, it stops feeling like a comeback.

It simply becomes the way you trade.

Bless you all.

- Luke

If you stay in trading long enough, you experience both sides of this yourself. I’ve had trades where I followed everything exactly as I should have and lost, and I’ve had trades in the past where my execution was terrible but the market bailed me out. The dangerous part is that, in the moment, the second one can actually feel better.

This makes learning from trading surprisingly difficult because the feedback you receive from the market isn’t always honest. Profit doesn’t automatically mean you did something well, and a loss doesn’t automatically mean there is something you need to fix.

And yet this is how most of us naturally judge ourselves.

We look at the outcome first.

I - Trading Is a Decision-Making Problem

Between 1991 and 1996, finance professors Brad Barber and Terrance Odean studied more than 66,000 brokerage accounts to see how individual investors actually behaved with their money.

One of their findings was pretty simple: the people who traded the most performed considerably worse.

The most active group in the study earned an annual return of around 11.4%, while the market returned 17.9% over the same period. Even the average household in the study, which traded much less aggressively, performed better than the group making the most decisions.

There are obviously differences between long-term retail investing in the 1990s and the kind of trading most of us do today, so I wouldn’t take this study and pretend it proves that trading frequently automatically makes you unprofitable. What I find interesting is the behaviour underneath it.

More opportunities to make decisions also means more opportunities to interfere.

Anyone who has traded for a few years probably knows what this looks like.

You take two losses in the morning and suddenly the third setup needs to make the money back. You miss a move you were waiting for all week and the mediocre setup fifteen minutes later starts looking much better than it really is. You have a great month, confidence goes up, and without really deciding to do it you start giving yourself a little more freedom with entries because you feel like you’re reading the market well.

I’ve done versions of all of these things.

And almost none of them feel irrational while they’re happening.

That is probably what makes them so difficult to catch.

When you move your stop, there is usually a reason. Maybe price hasn’t actually invalidated your idea yet. When you close a winner early, you can tell yourself that you’re managing risk. When you skip the next setup after four losses, being cautious sounds completely reasonable.

Give yourself enough time and you can build a convincing explanation for almost anything you do on a chart.

This was something I misunderstood for a long time. I thought becoming better at trading mostly meant getting better at reading the market. So naturally I kept learning. More price action, more data, more backtesting, more context, more small details that could potentially help me separate a winner from a loser.

Some of that helped a lot. You need to know what you’re doing and you need some kind of repeatable edge.

But eventually there is a point where knowing more stops solving the problems you’re actually having.

You can know your setup extremely well and still hesitate after a losing streak. You can have years of backtesting behind you and still feel the urge to interfere with a position when real money is moving. You can know perfectly well that one trade means almost nothing statistically and still spend the evening thinking about it.

This is where trading became much more interesting to me.

Because once you have a strategy you can actually trust, a huge part of the job becomes learning how to make the same quality of decisions while your emotional state keeps changing.

You have to make decisions when you’re confident and when you’re doubting yourself. After winning trades and after losing trades. During periods where everything seems obvious and during periods where you genuinely have no idea what the market is going to do.

The market doesn’t give you the luxury of knowing which trade will work before you take it. At best, you have a setup that has worked often enough in the past to justify risking money on it again.

For me, accepting that changed the question I was trying to answer.

I became much less interested in figuring out what the market was going to do next and much more interested in whether I could make a good decision with the information I had available right now.

That is a skill you can actually work on.

II - When Should You Trust Your Gut?

After enough time looking at charts, you start noticing things before you can properly explain them.

A setup appears and something about it feels wrong. Technically, most of your conditions are there, but you don’t want the trade. On another day you look at price for a few seconds and immediately understand what you want to see next, even though it would take much longer to explain the reasoning to somebody else.

I think anyone who has spent thousands of hours trading eventually develops some version of this.

The difficult part is figuring out whether that feeling comes from experience or emotion.

In 2009, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein published a paper together called Conditions for Intuitive Expertise. It was an interesting collaboration because the two had spent much of their careers looking at intuition from almost opposite directions. Kahneman’s work showed how easily human judgment becomes biased, while Klein had spent years studying experienced professionals whose intuition could be remarkably accurate.

One of Klein’s best-known examples came from his research with firefighters. An experienced fireground commander and his crew were fighting what appeared to be a fairly ordinary kitchen fire when the commander suddenly ordered everyone out of the building. He couldn’t immediately explain what had bothered him. Shortly after they left, the floor collapsed because the main fire had actually been burning underneath them.

There was nothing supernatural about what happened. Over years of attending fires, the commander had seen enough normal situations to notice when something didn’t fit. The room was unusually hot, the fire wasn’t responding the way he expected, and his brain recognized the mismatch before he could consciously put the pieces together.

This is roughly where Kahneman and Klein eventually found common ground.

Experience can produce very good intuition, but simply doing something for a long time isn’t enough. The environment needs to contain patterns that can actually be learned, and you need enough opportunities to practice those patterns while receiving useful feedback about whether your judgment was correct.

That distinction matters a lot in trading.

Imagine someone who has traded for five years but changes strategy every few months, jumps between different markets, takes different setups every week and rarely keeps detailed records. Technically, they have five years of experience. But what exactly has their brain been learning?

Now compare that with someone who has spent those same five years watching one market during the same session, executing a relatively narrow set of setups and reviewing hundreds or thousands of examples afterwards. Their experience is much more repetitive, and repetition gives the brain something useful to compare the current situation against.

This is one of the reasons I think screen time can be incredibly valuable while also being massively overrated.

Ten thousand hours of repeating the same mistake doesn’t automatically create expertise.

The quality of the feedback matters.

Trading makes this especially difficult because the feedback from an individual trade is noisy. You can read the situation well and lose. You can misunderstand everything and still win. If you use the outcome of every trade as your feedback, your intuition can easily learn the wrong lesson.

A winning revenge trade might teach you that aggression works.

A losing A+ setup might make you hesitate the next time it appears.

After enough of those experiences, what feels like “intuition” can simply be a collection of emotional memories you have never properly tested.

Kahneman and Klein made another point that I think traders should pay much more attention to: how confident an intuition feels tells you very little about whether it is accurate. A thought arriving instantly and with complete certainty can still be wrong.

I’ve experienced this myself. There have been days where I felt almost completely certain about what the market was about to do and was wrong, and other days where I wasn’t particularly confident but followed the setup anyway because it was there.

Over time, I’ve learned to give much more weight to evidence than to how convincing something feels in the moment.

If you’ve traded the same setup hundreds of times, documented it properly, reviewed the failures and know the conditions where it historically performs well, your intuition around that setup probably deserves some attention.

If you’ve seen something three times on Twitter and suddenly “feel” like NASDAQ is going to dump, probably less so.

Experience matters.

But only when you’ve actually given your brain something consistent enough to learn from.

III - When Confidence Starts Working Against You

Confidence is strange in trading because you obviously need some of it.

You cannot execute a strategy while questioning every entry, and it is difficult to sit through a drawdown if you have no trust in what you are doing. Most traders who have been around for a while understand this, so becoming more confident usually feels like progress.

There is a point, though, where confidence starts changing the way you make decisions.

Brad Barber and Terrance Odean looked at this in a study of more than 35,000 brokerage households. They were interested in overconfidence and used gender as a proxy because previous psychological research had found that men tended to be more overconfident than women in areas such as finance. In their sample, men traded 45% more than women, and that additional trading was associated with worse net performance. The difference became even larger among single investors, where single men traded 67% more than single women.

The interesting part for traders isn’t really the difference between men and women. It’s what the study suggests about what can happen when we become too confident in the quality of our own information.

We start acting on more of it.

I have noticed this in my own trading as well. Some of my worst decisions haven’t come when I was scared or completely lost.

You have a good month, then another good week, and gradually you start trusting yourself a little more than the process that produced those results. A setup that would normally be questionable suddenly looks good enough. You enter slightly earlier because you are confident about where price is going anyway. Maybe you increase the risk a little because the opportunity looks unusually clean.

None of these changes need to be dramatic. That is probably why they are easy to miss.

Your strategy can remain almost exactly the same while the amount of discretion you give yourself slowly increases.

This is also why a winning streak can be psychologically dangerous in a completely different way from a losing streak. Losses usually make the problem obvious because you feel something is wrong. Winning can hide bad decisions for much longer because the market keeps rewarding them.

Imagine you normally risk 0.5% per trade. One day you see a setup you really like and decide to risk 1%. It wins.

The next time you feel that same level of conviction, risking more becomes easier because you now have evidence that the previous decision worked. After a few experiences like this, what originally began as breaking your rules can slowly become part of the way you trade.

The problem is that the outcome never told you whether increasing the risk was a good decision. It only told you what happened on that particular trade.

This is where confidence becomes difficult to evaluate. When you are uncertain, you naturally look for evidence. When you are extremely confident, you tend to feel as though you already have enough.

And financial markets are a terrible place to stop questioning yourself.

Odean made a similar point in earlier research on individual investors. Investors in his sample traded excessively even though their trading reduced their returns on average. One explanation he examined was overconfidence: people can believe the information behind their decisions is more precise than it really is, which gives them more reasons to trade.

I think this becomes especially relevant once you have some experience.

After thousands of hours watching one market, you genuinely do know more than you did when you started. The difficult part is that there is no clear point where useful experience ends and unjustified certainty begins.

That is why I don’t think confidence should come from believing you know what happens next.

For me, the useful kind of confidence comes from knowing what I will do regardless of what happens next.

I know how much I’m willing to lose. I know what conditions I’m waiting for. I know when the trade is invalid. I know that a loss doesn’t automatically require me to change anything, and I know there will be periods where my read on the market is simply wrong.

That kind of confidence leaves some room for being wrong.

In trading, you need a lot of that room.

IV - A Good Trade Can Still Lose

One of the biggest changes in my trading came when I stopped expecting a good decision to produce a good result every time.

It sounds obvious when you say it like that. Everyone who trades understands probability at least on some level. We know a strategy can have an edge while losing regularly, we know losing streaks are normal, and we know there is no setup that works every time.

Then a loss actually happens and suddenly we forget all of it.

You take a setup exactly according to plan, get stopped out, and immediately start reviewing the chart looking for what you missed. Maybe the entry could have been better. Maybe there was some higher-timeframe level you should have noticed. Maybe the market conditions were slightly different. You keep looking until eventually you find something that explains why this particular trade lost.

The problem is that sometimes there is nothing to find.

In 1988, psychologists Jonathan Baron and John Hershey published a series of experiments on something called outcome bias. Participants were shown decisions made under uncertainty and asked to evaluate the quality of the thinking behind them. Even when people had the same information that was available to the decision-maker at the time, they rated decisions more favorably when the eventual outcome was good and more negatively when it was bad.

The decision itself hadn’t changed. People simply knew how it ended.

I think trading makes this bias especially difficult to avoid because we receive an outcome after almost every decision we make.

You enter a trade and eventually there is a number attached to it.

Once that number appears, it becomes very difficult to look back at the trade without allowing the result to influence what you see.

Suppose you break one of your entry rules, take a trade you probably shouldn’t have taken and make 3R. When you review it later, there is a good chance you will be more forgiving. Maybe the setup wasn’t actually that bad. Maybe your discretion was justified. Maybe this is something you should start looking for more often.

Now take the opposite situation. You wait patiently for your best setup, execute exactly where your plan tells you to execute, manage the risk correctly and lose 1R.

Which trade feels better?

Obviously the winner.

Which trade would you want to repeat another hundred times?

That depends entirely on the process behind them.

This is where I think traders can accidentally train themselves in the wrong direction. If every winning trade gets labeled as good and every losing trade gets treated as something that needs fixing, your journal eventually starts rewarding outcomes rather than behaviour.

And the market will occasionally reward some terrible behaviour.

You can move your stop and watch price reverse.

You can revenge trade and recover the entire day.

You can double your risk and catch the biggest winner of the month.

You can ignore your exit rules and make twice as much as you were supposed to.

Nothing about the profit tells you whether you should do any of those things again.

There is research showing just how naturally we struggle with this separation. Baron and Hershey’s original finding on outcome bias has since been tested again in a larger preregistered replication, where participants still rated the same underlying decisions differently depending on whether they were followed by favorable or unfavorable outcomes.

For traders, I think there is a fairly simple way to deal with this.

Judge the trade twice.

The first judgment happens before you know the result.

Write down why you’re taking it, whether it actually meets your conditions, what would invalidate it and anything unusual about the decision. You don’t need to write an essay before every entry. A few lines are enough.

Then review it after the outcome is known.

Now you have something incredibly useful: a record of what you actually believed before the P&L had a chance to change the story.

When I review trading this way, the question becomes much simpler:

Would I want to make this exact decision again if I could repeat the same situation hundreds of times?

If the answer is yes, I don’t need to be disappointed with the decision just because this particular trade lost.

And if the answer is no, making money from it doesn’t suddenly make it a good trade.

That separation is difficult at first because we’re naturally attached to money. Nobody genuinely feels exactly the same after making $1,000 as they do after losing $1,000.

You don’t need to.

You just need to make sure that the emotion attached to the result isn’t deciding what lesson you take from it.

Because over enough trades, you don’t want to become better at repeating whatever happened to work yesterday.

You want to become better at repeating decisions that make sense before you know how they end.

V - Why Taking the Loss Feels So Difficult

There is a behaviour in trading that makes very little sense from the outside but becomes completely understandable once you have money in a position.

A trade moves in your favour and suddenly you become protective of the profit. You start watching every small pullback, thinking about what you could lock in right now, and eventually closing the position feels like relief.

When the same trade moves against you, something different can happen. You become more patient.

You give it another candle. You find another level where price could reverse. The original reason for entering becomes less important because now you are focused on getting back to breakeven. Sometimes the amount of patience you were completely unable to give your winner suddenly appears the moment you’re sitting in a loss.

There is actual trading data behind this behaviour.

In 1998, Terrance Odean published a study using trading records from 10,000 accounts at a large U.S. discount brokerage between 1987 and 1993. He wanted to test something researchers had already started calling the disposition effect: the tendency to realize profitable positions more readily than losing ones.

That is exactly what he found.

Investors in the dataset showed a strong preference for realizing their winners while continuing to hold their losers. Odean also looked at several reasonable explanations for why this might happen. Maybe investors were simply rebalancing their portfolios. Maybe transaction costs made selling certain losing positions less attractive. Maybe the losing stocks were actually better investments going forward.

Those explanations didn’t account for the result.

In fact, the winners investors sold subsequently outperformed the losing positions they decided to keep.

I find this particularly interesting because the behaviour is easy to recognize in trading, even if the original study looked at investors holding stocks rather than short-term discretionary traders.

Once you’re in profit, there is something available to lose.

A trade showing +2R on your screen already feels partly yours. Watching it return to +1R feels different from watching a trade move from zero to +1R, even though you are sitting at exactly the same P&L in both situations.

The path matters.

The same thing happens on the other side. Closing a trade at -1R forces you to accept that the money is gone. Keeping the position open leaves another possibility available: maybe price comes back.

And sometimes it does.

That’s what makes this behaviour so easy to reinforce.

Move your stop once and get saved by a reversal, and your brain has just received a very convincing lesson. Hold a position longer than you were supposed to and watch it return to breakeven, and patience suddenly seems like the reason you survived.

The next time you’re in the same situation, you remember what happened.

This can slowly create a strange asymmetry in the way you manage trades. Winners have to constantly prove they deserve to remain open, while losers are given more and more opportunities to recover.

I don’t think the solution is simply telling yourself to “cut losers and let winners run.” Traders have heard that sentence thousands of times and still struggle with it.

It helps more to decide these things while there is nothing at stake.

Before the trade exists, you can think relatively clearly about where the idea is invalid, how much you’re willing to risk and what conditions justify an exit. Once you’re watching real money fluctuate, those same decisions become much easier to negotiate with yourself.

This is one reason I like having rules that are decided before the session. They reduce the number of conversations I need to have with myself while I’m already emotionally involved in the outcome.

You will never completely remove the feeling that comes with watching a profitable trade come back or accepting a loss.

I’m not sure you need to.

The more useful skill is noticing when that feeling starts changing a decision you had already made before the trade began.

VI - Write It Down Before You Know What Happens

There is something slightly uncomfortable about reviewing old trades when you have enough information recorded from the moment you actually took them.

You realize how much of the story you normally rewrite afterwards.

A trade stops out and, looking at the chart an hour later, the mistake suddenly seems obvious. There was a level you should have noticed, the entry was probably a little aggressive, price had already shown weakness somewhere else. Once you know where the market went, it becomes surprisingly easy to explain why it went there.

The problem is that you didn’t have that information when you entered.

This has been studied for decades as hindsight bias, sometimes called the “knew-it-all-along” effect. Once people know how an event ended, they tend to remember the outcome as having been more predictable than it actually was beforehand.

Trading gives this bias almost perfect conditions.

We have charts that allow us to scroll backwards after every session and inspect the past with information that wasn’t available when the decision was made. Once the candles on the right side of the chart exist, everything on the left starts looking different.

I’ve done this countless times during backtesting and trade reviews. You look at a losing trade and think, how did I not see that?

But hide everything that happened after the entry and suddenly the answer isn’t nearly as obvious.

This is one of the reasons I think a trading journal becomes much more useful when it records decisions rather than simply trades.

Most journals are basically databases of outcomes. Entry, stop loss, target, P&L, screenshot, maybe a short comment afterwards. That’s useful for collecting statistics, but it doesn’t always tell you much about the person who actually clicked the button.

What I want to know is what I believed at that moment.

Those answers become much more interesting a few weeks later.

Maybe you discover that the setups you felt least confident about actually performed perfectly well. Maybe your highest-conviction trades weren’t any better than average. Maybe most of your impulsive decisions happened after missing a move rather than after losing money. You might discover that your strategy wasn’t changing nearly as much as your behaviour was.

Without recording some of this beforehand, you are relying on memory to tell you what happened.

And memory already knows the result.

You don’t need to turn every trade into a psychology assignment either. I wouldn’t want to write half a page while an entry is forming. The whole thing can take thirty seconds.

The interesting part comes later, because now you have two versions of the same event. You have what you believed while the future was still uncertain, and you have what you think after seeing what actually happened.

The gap between those two versions can teach you a lot.

Over enough trades, you can also start checking whether your confidence deserves to be trusted. If you repeatedly rate setups highly and they perform no better than the ones you rate as average, that tells you something. If a certain emotional state keeps appearing before your worst executions, that tells you something too.

This is where journaling became more useful for me.

I don’t want a journal simply to remember my trades. I want it to show me things about my decisions that I wouldn’t have noticed while I was making them.

VII - Assume You’re Wrong Before You Enter

Most of us are very good at finding reasons to take a trade once we already want it.

You see the setup forming, you develop an idea of where price could go, and from that point your attention naturally starts moving toward information that supports it. The level looks clean. Higher timeframe context makes sense. There is liquidity where you expect price to move. Maybe you have seen something similar work several times recently.

By the time you’re ready to enter, you can probably explain the trade quite well.

What we don’t do nearly as often is spend the same amount of effort trying to destroy the idea.

Psychologist Gary Klein developed a simple exercise for this called a premortem. Instead of asking a group what could potentially go wrong with a plan, he asks them to imagine that they are already in the future and the plan has failed completely. Their job is to explain what happened.

The difference sounds small, but it changes how you look at the trade. Instead of collecting reasons why your idea should work, imagine you’re reviewing it later that evening and it turned into one of your worst decisions of the week. What happened? Maybe the setup wasn’t really part of your plan, you were still frustrated by the previous loss, or you increased risk because you felt unusually confident. Maybe you ignored something that didn’t fit your idea. Or maybe nothing was wrong at all - you followed your plan, managed the risk properly and the trade simply lost.

I wouldn’t do this before every entry because you can easily overthink yourself out of perfectly valid setups. I find it more useful when something feels unusual, especially when I’m considering breaking a rule, increasing risk or taking a trade I normally wouldn’t take.

Another question I like is: What would make me regret taking this trade even if it wins? If I double my normal risk and make money, enter outside my trading hours and catch a huge move, or move my stop and eventually get saved, do I actually want to repeat that decision another hundred times?

Some of the worst habits in trading survive because they occasionally work. A revenge trade saves the day, moving a stop prevents one loss, or oversizing produces your biggest winner of the month, and suddenly the result starts justifying the decision. Thinking about how the trade could go wrong beforehand makes it easier to separate those two things.

You won’t predict everything that can go wrong in the market, but you can usually predict the ways you are most likely to make it worse.

VIII - Five Questions Before You Take the Trade

After reading about overconfidence, outcome bias, hindsight bias and all the other ways our judgment can become distorted, it would be easy to think the solution is to analyze every decision even more.

I don’t think that’s particularly useful while you’re actually trading.

When price is moving and money is involved, I want fewer things to think about, not more. So most of what we’ve covered in this letter can be reduced to five questions that are worth asking whenever you’re unsure about a trade.

1. Is this actually my setup, or do I just want to trade?

This sounds almost too simple, but it catches a surprising number of bad decisions. Missing a move, sitting through a slow session or taking an early loss can gradually lower the standard for what starts looking tradeable.

2. What would change my mind?

Before entering, you should be able to identify what would make the idea invalid. If every piece of information can somehow be interpreted as supporting your position, you aren’t really evaluating the trade anymore.

3. Would I still be happy with this decision if it loses?

Imagine removing the outcome completely. If the trade stops out five minutes from now, will you still be able to look at the entry and say that you followed your process? This is probably the simplest way I’ve found to separate decision quality from P&L.

4. Am I trading this setup, or am I reacting to the previous one?

The previous trade has much more influence over the next decision than most of us want to admit. After a loss you may become too cautious or too aggressive; after a large winner, you may start seeing opportunities everywhere. The chart in front of you might be new, but you don’t always arrive at it with a clean mind.

5. Would I take this exact trade if I couldn’t see today’s P&L?

I really like this question because your daily result can quietly change your standards. When you’re down, a mediocre setup can become an opportunity to recover. When you’re up, the same setup can feel like you’re playing with money you’ve already made. Hiding the P&L mentally for a moment forces you to judge the trade on its own.

You don’t need to run through all five questions before every entry. If your setup is obvious and you’re executing normally, there is no reason to create hesitation where none existed. I find them much more useful when I notice myself negotiating with my rules, feeling unusually confident, trying to recover money or searching for a reason to enter something that wasn’t obvious in the first place.

Eventually, that is what better decision-making in trading looks like to me. You still make mistakes, you still misread the market and you still take perfectly good trades that lose, but you become much better at noticing when the decision in front of you is being influenced by something other than the process you intended to follow.

References

• Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2000). Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. Journal of Finance, 55(2), 773–806.

• Odean, T. (1999). Do Investors Trade Too Much? American Economic Review, 89(5), 1279–1298.

• Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755

• Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2001). Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(1), 261–292.

  Odean, T. (1999). Do Investors Trade Too Much? American Economic Review, 89(5), 1279–1298.

• Baron, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(4), 569–579. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.54.4.569.

• Aiyer, S., Kam, H. C., Ng, K. Y., Young, N. A., Shi, J., & Feldman, G. (2023). Outcomes Affect Evaluations of Decision Quality: Replication and Extensions of Baron and Hershey’s (1988) Outcome Bias Experiment 1.International Review of Social Psychology, 36(1). DOI: 10.5334/irsp.751.

• Odean, T. (1998). Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses? The Journal of Finance, 53(5), 1775–1798. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-1082.00072

• Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 288–299.

• Calvillo, D. P., & Gomes, D. M. (2021). Retrospective and Prospective Hindsight Bias: Replications and Extensions of Fischhoff (1975) and Slovic and Fischhoff (1977). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 104154.

• Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18–19.

Something very interesting has happened even without you realising it.

We spend years believing consistency is built by finding better entries, improving risk management or discovering a strategy with a higher win rate, while quietly carrying thousands of unresolved emotional experiences from previous trades into every decision we make. The charts change every day. The market participants change every day. The economic environment changes every year. But the lens through which you interpret a…

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This title probably sounds ridiculous coming from someone who’s been trading for six years, especially because if you asked me what I’ve spent most of those years doing, I’d probably answer with things that sound very “intelligent.” I’ve manually backtested thousands of trades, collected an unhealthy amount of data, refined my execution over and over again and spent countless hours trying to understand why markets behave the way they do. From the outside, it would be easy to assume that profitability came from becoming smarter.

The funny thing is that I don’t think that’s true anymore.

If I had to point to one reason why I eventually became profitable, it would be probably because I slowly stopped trying to prove that I understood it at all. Somewhere along the journey, I accepted that the market is simply too complex for me to explain every move, and the moment I stopped demanding certainty from it, trading ac…

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I’ve always liked having a plan. I like collecting data, building systems and trying to understand why things happen because it gives me the feeling that I’m reducing uncertainty. Looking back, I think that’s one of the reasons I was attracted to trading in the first place. Most people see trading as complete chaos, but once you’ve spent enough years doing it, you realize it isn’t really about predicting the future. It’s about building a process that gives you a small statistical advantage and then trusting that process over hundreds of trades instead of one.

The strange part is that while trading slowly taught me to accept uncertainty inside the markets, I was still trying to eliminate it everywhere else in my life. I wanted certainty that my strategy would continue working for years. I wanted certainty that every business idea I invested time into would eventually succeed. I wanted certainty that all the sacrifices I was making would pay off exactly the way I imagined they would. Deep down, I wanted life to guarantee me that if I did everything correctly, everything would work out.

Of course, that’s not how life works.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I wanted to believe that if I planned enough, researched enough and worked hard enough, I could remove uncertainty from my life altogether. The problem is that control is incredibly addictive because every time you think you’ve finally gained it, reality reminds you that there’s another piece of the puzzle that was never yours to control in the first place.

You can control how prepared you are before the market opens, but you can’t control what the market decides to do next. You can control how disciplined you are, but not whether your edge performs well this month or the next. You can control how much effort you put into your business, but not whether people decide to buy what you’re building. Even outside of work, you can control how you treat people, but you’ll never control how they respond to you.

For a long time I found that frustrating because I interpreted uncertainty as something that needed to be solved. These days I see it very differently. I think uncertainty is simply the price we pay for doing anything meaningful. If there were guarantees in trading, there would be no opportunity. If there were guarantees in business, everyone would become successful. The uncertainty is the reason the system exists in the first place.

I think one of the biggest shifts I’ve experienced over the years was understanding that my job was never to predict what would happen next. My job was to execute my process well enough that probabilities could play out over time. Once I genuinely accepted that, individual trades stopped carrying so much emotional weight because I no longer expected each one to prove that I was a good trader.

I’ve noticed myself applying that idea to other areas of my life as well.

When I publish a newsletter like this one, I don’t control whether people enjoy reading it or whether they’ll even open the email. When I post a video, I don’t control what the algorithm decides to do with it. If I decide to build a new project, I don’t control whether people will find it valuable enough to pay for it. The only thing I really control is whether I believe the work is worth creating and whether I can honestly say I gave it my best effort.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that much more peaceful than constantly chasing certainty.

I think a surprising amount of stress comes from taking responsibility for outcomes that were never entirely our responsibility to begin with. We blame ourselves for things influenced by timing, luck, other people’s decisions and circumstances we couldn’t possibly predict, and then we wonder why we constantly feel anxious or disappointed.

I’m definitely not perfect at this.

There are still days when I catch myself trying to force an answer that doesn’t exist yet or worrying about something that’s months away. The difference is that I recognize it much sooner than I used to. Whenever I feel myself spiraling into overthinking, I try to ask one simple question: Is this actually something I can influence today, or am I trying to control something that was never mine to control in the first place?

Most of the time, that question is enough to bring me back to reality.

The market has never promised certainty, and neither has life. Maybe that’s not something we should be trying to fix. Maybe real peace isn’t found by controlling more and more parts of our lives, but by becoming comfortable with the fact that some things will always remain outside of our control.

Bless you all.

Luke

I thought it would be good gadget to have, but honestly I did not need it at all. For years I had managed perfectly fine without it, and if I’m being honest, I never really understood the obsession people had with tracking every little thing they did throughout the day. I don’t even wear a normal watch. I didn’t care how many calories I burned or how many steps I had taken and I certainly didn’t feel the need to wake up every morning and immediately check how well I had slept.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I thought it would simply be interesting to collect a little more data about myself. I spend a large part of my life looking at statistics in trading, so why not do the same with my health? Maybe I’d discover something useful. Maybe I’d improve my sleep. Maybe I’d build healthier habits.

For the first few days, that’s exactly what happened.

Every morning I’d open the sleep app before I’d even gotten out of bed. I’d check how many hours I’d slept, compare it to the previous night, look at my resting heart rate and then spend a few minutes trying to understand why one night scored an 89 and another scored a 76. It became a small part of my morning routine without me even realizing it.

Then something strange started happening.

I stopped paying attention to how I actually felt.

Instead, I started paying attention to the number.

If I woke up feeling rested but the watch gave me a mediocre score, I suddenly found myself questioning whether I’d actually slept well. If the score was high, I somehow felt more satisfied with my sleep, even if I couldn’t honestly tell the difference between that morning and the one before it.

The number quietly became more important than the experience itself.

Trading has trained my brain to think in numbers. For years I’ve measured almost everything. Win rate. Average R. Drawdown. Monthly return. Number of trades. Expected value. Statistics have become one of the ways I understand the world, and I genuinely think they’ve made me a much better trader because they remove emotion from decisions.

The problem is that not everything in life should be approached the way we approach trading.

Without even noticing it, I started treating sleep like another performance metric. More than make myself feel rested after the sleep - I was trying to wake up with a better score. If my sleep wasn’t improving, I wanted to know why. If my resting heart rate changed, I wanted to understand the reason. Even going for a walk became less about enjoying the walk and more about whether I’d close another ring before the end of the day.

It sounds ridiculous when I write it down.

But I know I’m not the only person who does this.

I think we’re living in a time where everything has become measurable, and because it’s measurable, we immediately assume it should be optimized. We optimize our productivity, our workouts, our diets, our finances, our calendars and our sleep and after a while you almost start feeling guilty when you’re simply living without collecting data about it.

The funny thing is that none of those numbers actually made me healthier.

Instead of listening to my body, I started listening to my watch. Instead of asking myself whether I felt rested, I asked my wrist. Instead of enjoying progress naturally, I started chasing another statistic.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is exactly how I used to approach trading.

Years ago I was obsessed with finding the perfect system. Then I became obsessed with improving my statistics. Then I wanted a higher win rate. Then a bigger account. There was always another number that could be improved and every improvement immediately created another target.

That’s the dangerous thing about optimization.

It never ends.

There is always another percentage to increase. Another hour to save. Another score to improve. Another graph to make look a little better.

I’ve actually been thinking about selling the watch. Yes, for real.

The problem is that I know myself well enough to realize that I’ll never treat it as “just information.” My brain doesn’t look at numbers passively. It immediately turns them into goals and once something becomes a goal, I slowly stop enjoying it for what it is.

Trading already gives me more than enough numbers to think about every single day.

I don’t need sleep becoming another competition with myself.

Maybe not everything that can be measured needs to be measured.

Maybe not everything that can be optimized actually needs to be optimized.

And maybe sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is take the watch off, stop checking the statistics and simply trust that your body knows a little more than another screen ever could.

Bless you all.

Luke

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about goals, which is funny because if you know me, you’ll know I’m probably the last person who should be questioning them. I’ve always been someone who needs something difficult to work towards. Whether it was becoming profitable, passing funded challenges, growing a business, traveling on low budget or more recently starting completely new hobbies, I’ve always had something sitting on the horizon that made me excited to wake up the next morning.

For a long time, I thought that was simply how ambitious people were supposed to live. You reach one destination, celebrate it for a moment and immediately start looking for the next mountain to climb. That’s how progress happens, right? The problem is that after living this way for years, I started noticing something that made me a little uncomfortable.

Every goal feels life-changing before you reach it.

Almost every goal feels surpris…

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The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve realized that professional trading has surprisingly little to do with being right. In fact, some of my best months came from periods where I was wrong over and over again. The only difference was that I had accepted being wrong as part of the business instead of treating it like a personal failure.

That’s a lesson I wish I had understood much earlier.

I think a lot of people - not only traders - build their identity around always being right. You see it everywhere. People argue online not because they want to understand each other, but because they want to win. They defend opinions they’ve held for years simply because admitting they were wrong would hurt their ego. Somewhere along the way, being correct became more important than learning something new.

Trading doesn’t let you do that for very long.

The market doesn’t care how convinced you are. It doesn’t care how beautiful your analysis looks or how many reasons you have for taking a trade. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong and your account reminds you of that very quickly.

At first I hated that.

Every losing trade felt like proof that I wasn’t good enough. I would spend hours trying to figure out how I could have avoided it, convincing myself that profitable traders somehow had a way of eliminating losses completely. It took me years to realize that the goal wasn’t to avoid being wrong. The goal was to become comfortable with being wrong often enough that it stopped affecting my decision-making.

Once you remove your ego from the equation, a losing trade becomes information instead of an insult. A drawdown becomes feedback instead of evidence that you’ve failed. You stop defending your opinions and start testing them. You become much more curious because you no longer need reality to agree with you.

I’ve noticed that this way of thinking has slowly started affecting areas of my life that have nothing to do with trading.

A few years ago, admitting I was wrong felt almost uncomfortable. If somebody challenged my opinion, I immediately wanted to defend it. If I had spent weeks researching something, I felt like changing my mind somehow meant all that time had been wasted. Today I look at it very differently. I don’t mind saying, “I don’t know,” because I think it’s a much more honest answer than pretending to have certainty where none exists. I don’t mind changing my opinion when new information appears, and I certainly don’t mind admitting that I misunderstood something, because I’d rather improve my understanding than protect my ego.

I think that’s one of the biggest gifts trading has given me.

I’ve been experiencing something very similar since I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The mats are brutally honest because there is nowhere to hide. If your technique isn’t good enough, somebody exposes it within seconds. If you make the same mistake over and over again, you’ll find yourself in the exact same bad position over and over again. Nobody cares how confident you sounded while explaining a technique or how many instructionals you’ve watched at home. The only thing that matters is whether you can actually apply what you’ve learned against someone who is resisting.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that both trading and BJJ are constantly teaching the same lesson.

Bless you all.

Luke

Without even thinking, I answered, “I’m a trader.” It wasn’t until later that day that I realized how strange that answer actually was. Because yes, I trade. It’s how I make money, it’s a skill I’ve spent almost six years developing, and it’s something I genuinely enjoy. But when I thought about it more, I realized trading isn’t who I am. It’s simply one thing that I do.

I don’t think I always looked at it that way.

Somewhere along the journey, trading slowly became my identity. Everything in my life revolved around it. My social media became about trading. My daily routine revolved around the markets. Most conversations somehow ended up being about trading. Even when people introduced me to someone new, I wasn’t Luke anymore. I was “the trader.”

At first that sounds completely normal. If you dedicate years of your life to mastering something, of course it becomes a big part of who you are. The problem starts when your identity becomes dependent on your performance.

Suddenly every trade carries much more weight than it should. A winning month doesn’t simply mean your strategy performed well - it means you’re doing well. A losing month doesn’t feel like normal variance anymore. It feels personal. It feels like you’ve somehow failed as a person, even if you followed every single rule perfectly.

I don’t think I fully understood this until last year.

Earlier that year I was traveling around Southeast Asia, trading a few hours a day and living a life that younger me would’ve considered impossible. Then I came back home, the markets changed and I went through one of the worst periods of my trading career. I lost thirty-six trades in a row while staying completely disciplined. You read it right - 36. I didn’t revenge trade. I didn’t increase my risk. I trusted my data because I had spent years collecting it.

The strange part was realizing how much those losses affected me outside the charts. I caught myself questioning things that had nothing to do with trading. My confidence dropped, because somewhere deep down I had allowed trading results to determine how I felt about myself. I had stopped seeing trading as a profession and started treating it as my identity.

One of the reasons I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu this year was because I wanted something that had absolutely nothing to do with the markets. I wanted to be terrible at something again. I wanted to walk into a room where nobody knew or cared what my trading results looked like. On the mats, nobody asks how much money you’ve made this month. Nobody cares how many followers you have. The only thing that matters is whether you show up, learn and improve.

It reminded me that life feels much healthier when you have more than one thing that gives you purpose.

If trading is your only source of confidence, every drawdown becomes an identity crisis. If trading is your only passion, every losing streak starts leaking into every other area of your life. But when you have family, friends, hobbies, sports or other meaningful things outside the charts, losses stay where they belong. They remain trading losses instead of becoming life losses.

Ironically, I think becoming less emotionally attached to trading has made me a better trader.

I don’t need every trade to prove that I’m good enough anymore. I don’t need every winning month to validate my decisions, and I don’t need to panic every time I hit a difficult period. The markets don’t owe me anything, and they certainly don’t determine my value as a person.

I think that’s one of the biggest mindset shifts a trader can make.

Treat trading as a craft. Treat it as a business. Treat it as a profession if that’s your goal. But be careful not to let it become the only thing that defines you, because markets change, strategies evolve and every trader eventually goes through periods where nothing seems to work.

When that happens, it’s much easier to survive if your entire identity isn’t sitting inside your brokerage account.

Bless you all.

Luke

When I started trading, I genuinely believed that profitability would change much more than it actually did. I imagined that once I became successful enough, people would finally understand why I spent so many hours staring at charts, why I disappeared on weekends to backtest and why I was willing to spend years pursuing something that most people around me considered either impossible or straight-up gambling.

I think a lot of traders secretly believe this, even if they don’t admit it out loud. It’s not necessarily because they want attention or because they want to show off. Most of the time it’s much simpler than that. They want validation. They want proof that all the effort was worth it. They want the people who doubted them to finally understand. They want family members who questioned their decisions to change their minds. They want friends to respect what they do. They want some kind of acknowledgement …

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The funny thing is that when I was a beginner, I thought successful traders would be doing exactly the opposite. I imagined profitable traders spending all day researching the markets, watching every piece of content they could find and constantly looking for new information that would somehow give them an edge.

What I eventually discovered was that most of the information I was consuming was simply making me feel like I was becoming better trader.

And there is a massive difference between being and feeling.

When I first started trading, I became obsessed. Every strategy looked interesting. Every mentor seemed to know something I didn’t. Every YouTube video promised a new perspective, a new edge or a new way of looking at the markets. I genuinely believed that profitability was hiding somewhere inside all that information and if I just consumed enough of it, eventually everything would click.

The problem is that information creates a very convincing illusion of progress. You finish a two-hour video and feel productive. You read a trading book and feel productive. You spend an evening researching market structure and feel productive. Your brain rewards you because learning feels good, and because learning feels good, it becomes very easy to confuse it with actual improvement.

The market, however rewards just and only - execution.

And execution is significantly less exciting than learning.

Execution is taking the same setup for the hundredth time. Execution is collecting data when nobody is watching. Execution is sitting through losing periods without abandoning your system. Execution is following rules during the moments when your emotions are screaming at you to do the exact opposite.

Nobody posts YouTube videos about that because it isn’t entertaining.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that many traders become addicted to information because information is safe. As long as you’re learning, there is always another explanation for why you’re not where you want to be. Maybe you need another strategy. Maybe you need another mentor. Maybe you need another course. Maybe there is still some secret that somebody else knows and you don’t.

The uncomfortable possibility is that you already know enough.

The uncomfortable possibility is that the thing standing between you and better results isn’t missing information but your inability to consistently execute the information you already have.

That realization changed a lot for me.

At some point I stopped looking for more strategies and started trying to understand myself more deeply. I stopped asking what everybody else was doing and became more interested in what my own data was telling me. I stopped caring about market predictions because I realized that predictions weren’t making me money anyway. The only thing that mattered was whether I could execute my process consistently over a large enough sample size.

Ironically, that’s when trading became simpler.

Not easier.

But simpler.

One of the reasons I enjoy training BJJ now is because it reminds me of this constantly. Nobody cares how many instructionals you’ve watched. Nobody cares how many techniques you can explain. The moment the round starts, reality takes over. Either you can perform under pressure or you can’t. Either you can apply the technique against resistance or you can’t.

Trading works exactly the same way.

You can watch somebody explain discipline for ten hours. You can read every psychology book ever written. You can listen to every successful trader on the internet (there is almost none of them online lol, whatever).

Eventually, you still have to sit alone in front of the charts and make decisions.

And that’s where real learning happens.

Looking back, I don’t think most traders need more information. If anything, most traders are drowning in information. They are trying to combine ten different systems, twenty different opinions and fifty different lessons into something coherent. Instead of becoming more confident, they become more confused because every new piece of information creates another decision to make.

The traders who seem to survive the longest are often the ones who simplify. They find something that makes sense to them, spend years refining it and allow experience - not content - to become their teacher.

I do not want to blame overall education. Education is extremely valuable. But there comes a point where consuming more becomes a form of procrastination. A point where another video feels productive but produces nothing. A point where you have to stop researching and start doing.

Also what it necessary to point out here is that 99% of the information on current trading scene is bullshit - just stating the facts.

Trust more in your experience and let it guide you.

Bless you all.

Luke

I was sitting at home and doing all the things I usually do during the day and for some reason I felt stressed. Nothing bad had happened. Nobody was dying. There was no emergency. There wasn’t even a deadline I absolutely had to meet. Yet somehow I felt like I was running late.

Late for what exactly, I don’t know.

The funny thing is that when I looked back at my life, I realized this feeling has been with me for years. When I started trading, I was in a hurry to make money trading. When I made money, I was in a hurry to get funded with bigger account. When I got a bigger account, I was in a hurry to make even more money. Then I wanted more freedom. Then more followers. Then a bigger business.

Every goal I reached simply created another goal.

I think a lot of traders understand this feeling because trading attracts ambitious people. Most people reading this are not sitting around waiting for life to happen. They are trying to improve themselves, build something, create freedom for themselves and their families, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The problem starts when your entire life becomes a race toward some future version of yourself that doesn’t even exist yet.

I spent years believing that once I reached a certain point, things would finally calm down. I thought that once I became profitable, I would stop worrying. Then I thought that once I had enough money, I would stop stressing.

What I discovered instead is that the human brain is incredibly good at moving the goalposts.

The things that once felt impossible eventually become normal. The things you prayed for become things you barely think about. The dreams become expectations, and then the expectations become pressure.

A few years ago, being able to trade for a living sounded ridiculous to me. The idea that I could wake up wherever I wanted, open a laptop and make money from the markets felt almost unrealistic. Then I spent months traveling around Southeast Asia and living exactly that reality. The funny thing is that while I was there, I was already thinking about the next thing. I was already worrying about growth, performance, future plans and everything else that was supposedly waiting for me.

I had what I wanted, but my mind was somewhere else.

I think social media makes this even worse. No matter what you achieve, there is always someone making more money than you. Someone with a bigger business. Someone younger. Someone with a nicer lifestyle. Someone posting screenshots that make it look like they have life completely figured out.

You can be having a genuinely good day, open your phone for five minutes, and suddenly feel behind in life despite the fact that nothing actually changed.

What interests me the most is how this compounds over time.

People talk about compound interest all the time, but stress compounds too.

One stressful day is not a problem. One stressful week is not a problem either. But spending years in a state where you constantly feel like you should be somewhere else, earning more, doing more, achieving more and becoming more starts to leave a mark on you. It slowly becomes your default state.

You stop enjoying where you are because your attention is always focused on where you think you should be.

You stop appreciating progress because all you can see is the distance that remains.

You stop feeling grateful for what you have because you are obsessed with what you don’t have.

And eventually you wake up one day realizing that you have spent years chasing freedom while feeling mentally imprisoned by your own expectations.

Ironically, trading taught me the opposite lesson.

Some of the best trades I have ever taken happened because I waited. They happened because I sat there, did nothing and allowed the opportunity to come to me.

Yet for some reason I have often approached life differently than I approach trading.

I have rushed things.

I have worried about things that were years away.

I have felt pressure that existed only inside my own head.

I have acted as if life was some kind of race where everybody starts at the same line and the winner is the person who accumulates the most achievements before the finish.

The older I get, the less I believe that.

I still have goals. I still want to build things. I still want to improve and I absolutely don’t think ambition is the enemy.

I just don’t want to spend the next ten years of my life constantly waiting for my life to begin.

Because if there is one thing I have learned over the last few years, it is that the future arrives much faster than you think. One day you are dreaming about becoming a trader. The next day you realize you have been doing it for almost six years. One day you are telling yourself that you’ll be happy when you finally reach a certain goal. The next day you realize you reached it a long time ago and immediately replaced it with another one.

Maybe the answer is not to stop chasing meaningful goals.

Maybe the answer is simply to stop treating every season of life as a waiting room for the next one.

So if you’ve been feeling stressed recently, ask yourself a simple question.

Why are you in such a hurry?

The future will arrive whether you worry about it or not.

Bless you all.

- Luke

After many years, now I have an option, to go to one of the best gyms I could ever imagine and do Jiu-Jitsu with one the best mentors in my country, so that’s exactly what I am doing now. I am training BJJ now.

To be honest, I expected it to be hard - but it is way harder than I could ever imagine. I am getting beaten up much more than I did back then in the MMA. Main reason for that is that I was not the tallest guy in any room and now imagine when you are the guy who doesn’t have weight to overwork other nor the technique to beat someone. I am still one of the weakest people there, but you know what? I am used to it.

When I started trading, I knew shit about the markets. Anybody around me knew the same shit I did and was beating me up mentally, that trading sucks and it is just gambling - but here I am. Almost 6 years later, doing the same thing almost everyday. I am used to pain.

There is something about getting beaten up every training (you can read it as trading session as well), but still showing up and giving it all.

Trading simply built me this mindset I have now. I can do hard shit and don’t give a single fuck about the short term outcome.

If you do trading (probably you do if you read my letters), believe that even if it sucks now, it will help you in other aspects of your life. It might be miserable now, but you will become unshakable. Because the short term results will not create any hard feelings. You will just go and get beaten up.

After all - the life will beat you up.

But that’s what’s beautiful about that.

There is no joy in summer, when you don’t know that the winter is coming.

Bless you all.

Luke

P.S. - As said in previous letters, feel free to reach out to me, talk with me about anything - some of you already did, thank you! I am looking forward to meet you guys.

But over the last few months, something changed - and honestly, I didn’t like it.

I’ve been on social media for a while now, and I feel like it slowly shaped me into someone I never wanted to become. I created this personality called “iamflowtrader”, but the truth is… lately, I haven’t felt much like a flow trader at all.

It started feeling like the account was taking something out of me. Like I constantly needed to prove I was a good trader. To show profits. To show results. To maintain an image.

And I never wanted this journey to become about that.

I’m not the type of person who can fake success online just to sell people a dream. I started this account because I genuinely wanted to help traders - real traders. People going through the same battles I’ve been through. Not gamblers chasing rented Lamborghinis and fake lifestyles pushed by people selling an illusion.

I’m honestly glad I realized this before I lost myself in it completely.

Some of you probably remember the losing streak I went through a few months ago. It hit my ego harder than anything before.

Earlier that year, I was traveling through Southeast Asia, living what I thought was the dream. Trading a couple hours a day, making good money, experiencing true freedom for the first time in my life. I truly believed I had “made it.”

Then I came back home.

I was motivated. Hungry. Ready to push harder than ever. But the comeback was brutal.

I took 36 losses in row. What is insane is that I really stayed so disciplined that even if I had this AWFUL months, I never broke a single rule, just believed it will switch, because I trusted in my data I have collected (~5 years of manual backtest). But the fundamentals changed. The markets did as well.

From making over 38% in one single year - while doing sidequests in Asia. To wondering what is happening.

I went through one of the hardest periods of my trading career while staying completely disciplined. I trusted my data. I trusted years of backtesting and experience. But sometimes, markets evolve and what once worked stops working the same way.

That reality humbled me more than any motivational quote ever could.

At the same time, it was one of the hardest years of my life outside trading too. Health problems. Career struggles. A lot of internal pressure.

And honestly, the thing that helped me the most wasn’t money. It was people.

Money improves your life, absolutely. It gives you freedom, opportunities, and the ability to help people you love. But the idea that money alone will finally make you feel complete is one of the biggest lies people sell online.

So I want to change the direction of my content a bit.

Less pretending.

Less “look at me.”

Less pressure to appear successful all the time.

I want this newsletter and my socials to become more personal. More honest. More human.

I’m tired of fake perfection online, and I don’t want to contribute to it anymore.

So let’s just talk.

Trader to trader.

Human to human.

And if you enjoy this type of newsletter, let me know. In many ways, this feels more like a personal reflection than content I “should” post.

But maybe that’s exactly why I should post it.

Change is coming.

Bless you all.

• Luke

Every trader knows they should wait for the right setup. Most traders cannot. The gap between knowing and doing is not a knowledge problem. It is a structural problem — one that willpower addresses poorly and written process addresses well.

The cost of impatience in trading is direct and measurable. Every trade taken outside the strategy’s defined criteria is a sample drawn from a different distribution than the one the strategy was designed to exploit. That sample may win or lose in any individual instance, but over a large number of such trades it will produce worse expectancy than the on-criteria trades, because the criteria were designed precisely to identify the situations where the strategy’s edge is present. A trade taken because the session has been quiet and something needs to happen is not a setup. It is an activity substitute, and it costs money with the reliability of a tax.

What makes the patience problem genuinely difficult is that it operates through mechanisms that are n…

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None of those factors are accurate representations of reality. The market does not know or care about the previous trade. The probability that any specific setup works is not altered by the outcome of the trade that preceded it. The urgency to recover is a product of emotional pain, not of genuine opportunity. The trade that feels most compelling in the minutes after a stop-out is almost never the trade that the written strate…

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When the assumption breaks down — when positions move together because they are driven by the same underlying factor — the math changes entirely. Five correlated positions at one percent each can produce five percent losses not just when all five are wrong, but whenever the shared underlying factor moves against them. The individual position limits mean nothing if the positions themselves are not independent. The risk model l…

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Most traders review their trades the way most people assess their own driving — they conclude they are above average, their mistakes were situational, and their successes were the product of skill. The journal becomes a document that confirms what the trader already believes rather than one that reveals what is actually happening.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem. A review process that produces biased conclusions does so because it is designed, usually unintentionally, to allow bias in. The trader reviews outcomes rather than decisions. They remember what happened differently from how it actually occurred. They apply different standards of scrutiny to winning trades and losing trades. They focus on the trades that stand out rather than on the statistical patterns that only appear across a large sample. Each of these tendencies has a predictable direction, and that direction is always toward flattering the trader’s self-image at the expense of accurate diagnosis.

…

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Most traders treat the watchlist as a collection of names they are interested in. Professional traders treat it as the output of a structured filtering process that narrows the entire market down to the specific situations where their edge has the highest probability of being present. Those are not the same thing.

The distinction matters more than it initially appears. A watchlist built from general interest, recent news flow, or social media attention produces a list of tickers with varying degrees of relevance to the trader’s actual setup criteria. Some will be genuinely actionable. Most will not. The trader spends the session monitoring a mixture of real opportunities and noise, unable to clearly separate the two until after the session is over and the opportunity has already passed.

A watchlist built from a structured filtering process arrives at the session ready. Every name on it has already passed through a sequence of criteria that align with the trader’s specific edge. The setu…

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