But recently, things have started to change.

Several pairs on my watchlist are finally approaching levels I’ve been waiting for and some of them are looking particularly interesting. That doesn’t mean I’ll enter all of them, but for the first time in a while, I’m seeing opportunities worth paying attention to.

And by actively watching, I obviously mean setting my TradingView alerts and forgetting about the charts until they notify me. Lol.

In today’s paid letter, I’m sharing something I think you’ll find particularly valuable.

Instead of showing you trades after they’ve already happened, I’ll walk you through 5 pairs I’m watching right now, my actual open positions, where I’m looking to enter next and how I plan to manage everything over the coming days and weeks.

You’ll see my thinking before the outcome is known, including what would make me enter, what would make me stay out and where I’d admit my idea was wrong.

I’ve also just introduced a 7-day free trial of Flow Journal+. So if you’ve been curious about what I share with paid subscribers, you can now explore the full experience for a week and decide for yourself whether it’s worth staying.

No need to take my word for it. Have a look at how I actually approach the markets.

I. GBP/JPY - The Setup I Waited For

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As some of you already know (thank you all who have subscribed to paid already), I’ve recently introduced Flow Journal+, a paid version of this newsletter where I want to explore topics in considerably more depth. After publishing more than 67 weekly newsletters for free, I realized that producing longer, better-researched letters takes a significant amount of time, especially when I want to connect trading with ideas from psychology, science and other fields that might help us understand performance differently.

However, I also understand that paying for something you haven’t experienced can be difficult, which is why I’ve decided to make this entire Flow Journal+ edition available for free. I want everyone to see what the paid newsletters will look like, what kind of research and practical insights they can expect, and whether it’s something they would find valuable. The regular Sunday Flow Journal will continue as usual, while Flow Journal+ will focus on deeper topics that I believe deserve more than a few paragraphs.

With that being said, let’s get into today’s topic.

First of all - What does it mean to be exceptional?

I’ve been trading for more than five years, spending over four of those years doing it full-time, and one thing I’ve gradually realized is that becoming a good trader is already difficult enough, but becoming exceptional at it is an entirely different challenge.

When I first started, I naturally associated exceptional trading with exceptional results. Someone managing millions of dollars, generating impressive returns, or consistently withdrawing significant profits must have figured out something that the rest of us hadn’t. It seemed reasonable because trading is one of those professions where financial results are incredibly visible, and we’re constantly surrounded by people showing us how much money they’ve made.

However, the longer I’ve been involved in trading, the less interested I’ve become in judging someone’s ability from their recent results. I’ve managed hundreds of thousands in funded capital, and experienced periods where everything seemed to work, only to go through setbacks that forced me to reconsider things I thought I understood. Those experiences taught me that good decisions don’t always produce good outcomes, and good outcomes don’t necessarily mean someone made good decisions.

This distinction is particularly important in trading because randomness plays such an enormous role. A trader can follow a profitable strategy almost perfectly and lose money for weeks, while someone else can make terrible decisions and still experience an incredibly profitable month.

In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Financial Markets, researchers examined the performance of day traders in Taiwan over several years and found that while genuine trading skill appeared to exist, fewer than 1% of day traders reliably generated positive abnormal returns after fees.

I find this fascinating because it suggests that exceptional traders really do exist, but developing the abilities necessary to become one is considerably more difficult than most people imagine.

So what actually separates them from everyone else?

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I - Exceptional Traders Practice Differently

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about expertise is that spending thousands of hours doing something doesn’t automatically make you exceptional at it. We tend to associate experience with skill, but those two things aren’t necessarily as closely connected as we think.

Consider how many people have been driving cars for twenty or thirty years without becoming particularly skilled drivers. They’ve accumulated thousands of hours behind the wheel, yet very few would perform exceptionally well on a professional racing circuit. The difference is that ordinary experience and deliberate improvement are two completely different activities.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson explored this in his influential 1993 research on deliberate practice, arguing that exceptional performance is closely associated with activities specifically designed to improve particular aspects of a skill. The important part is that practice needs to expose weaknesses, provide meaningful feedback, and create opportunities for correction, rather than simply repeat something you’re already comfortable doing.

I think this applies extremely well to trading because it’s possible to spend years looking at charts without developing a much deeper understanding of what you’re doing. Two traders might spend three hours studying the market every day, but while one simply watches price movements and looks for opportunities, the other investigates specific weaknesses, reviews execution mistakes, and tests whether their assumptions are supported by data.

Both spend the same amount of time trading, but their opportunities for improvement are completely different.

I’ve gradually moved toward a much narrower approach myself, focusing on a specific strategy and a relatively small number of decisions. I don’t believe that watching more charts or collecting more strategies would necessarily make me better today. In fact, I suspect it would introduce unnecessary noise into something I’ve spent years trying to simplify.

The practical takeaway: I would highly recommend you to stop measuring your dedication by how much time you spend trading, and start measuring whether that time is actually improving something. If you cannot identify what you’re working on, what feedback you’re collecting and how you’ll recognize improvement, there’s a good chance you’re accumulating experience without developing much additional expertise.

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II - Exceptional Traders Think Like Scientists

Trading naturally encourages us to develop opinions about how markets behave. We discover patterns, build strategies around them, and gradually become convinced that we’ve understood something important. The problem is that once we become emotionally attached to an idea, we often start searching for evidence that supports it while ignoring information that contradicts it.

Psychologist Peter Wason demonstrated this tendency in his 1960 research on hypothesis testing, showing how people often prefer evidence consistent with their existing beliefs rather than actively searching for ways to disprove them.

Imagine developing a strategy based on a particular price pattern. After reviewing several successful examples, you become convinced it provides a meaningful advantage, and from that point onward, every winning trade reinforces your belief while losing trades become easier to explain away. Perhaps the market was unusually volatile, the setup wasn’t perfect, or something unexpected happened.

Some of those explanations might be legitimate, but if you continuously introduce exceptions after observing the outcome, you’re no longer objectively evaluating your strategy. You’re protecting your original belief.

Also there is another important concept from statistics: overfitting. In the research from 2015 on the probability of backtest overfitting, Bailey and his colleagues examined how selecting strategies based on historical performance can produce impressive-looking results that fail to generalize to new data.

We keep adjusting strategies until the historical results look attractive, without realizing that we might simply be fitting our rules to randomness. I’ve become increasingly cautious about modifying my own approach after disappointing periods because I would rather understand the limitations of a relatively simple strategy than convince myself I’ve discovered something perfect through endless optimization.

I think that you know this feeling too - you just backtest and start going back after you take a loss and start adjusting your enter based on this data that “you would do it differently now”. That’s nonsense. You know it, I know it, but we still do it.

The practical takeaway: For every trading idea you believe in from now on, ask yourself what evidence would make you reconsider it. Test your assumptions against data you haven’t used to develop the strategy, and become comfortable discovering that something you believed might not actually be true.

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III - Exceptional Traders Understand That Being Wrong Is Normal

One of the most difficult things about trading is that being wrong is unavoidable, regardless of how skilled you become. In fact, depending on the relationship between average winners and losers, a trader might have a win rate of 30% or 40% and still possess a profitable strategy.

Yet emotionally, we’re often poorly equipped to deal with this reality.

In their famous 1979 paper on Prospect Theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that people tend to evaluate gains and losses asymmetrically, with losses often having a stronger psychological impact than equivalent gains.

This helps explain why losing trades can feel so disproportionately painful, even when they’re completely normal outcomes within a profitable strategy. A loss might represent nothing more than ordinary statistical variation, but emotionally it can feel like evidence that something is wrong, that we’re falling behind, or that we need to immediately recover.

I’ve experienced losing streaks that would probably make many traders question whether their strategy had stopped working. At one point, I went through 36 consecutive losing trades and even though I understood the statistical nature of my approach, experiencing that period was considerably more difficult than understanding the mathematics behind it.

What I’ve learned is that knowing losses are inevitable doesn’t automatically make them easy to accept. You still have to deal with frustration, uncertainty and the temptation to interfere with a process that might be functioning exactly as expected.

I think exceptional traders develop a different relationship with being wrong. They understand that individual outcomes provide limited information about the quality of their decisions, and they avoid treating every loss as something that needs to be corrected. Of course, that doesn’t mean blindly following a strategy forever, because market conditions change and strategies can lose their advantage. The difficult part is distinguishing ordinary statistical variation from meaningful evidence that something has deteriorated.

The practical takeaway: Understand what a normal losing period looks like for your strategy before you experience one. Study historical drawdowns, losing streaks and variability, while remembering that historical results don’t establish the worst possible future outcome.

IV - Exceptional Traders Design Their Environment

I’ve written quite a lot about discipline over the years, and my perspective on it has changed considerably. When I was less experienced, I thought disciplined traders were simply people with unusually strong self-control, capable of resisting every temptation and consistently making rational decisions regardless of what was happening around them.

However, the more I’ve learned about human behavior, the more I question whether relying on willpower is a particularly effective long-term strategy.

One area of psychology that I find especially relevant is the study of implementation intentions, which are essentially predefined plans specifying how someone will respond when a particular situation occurs.

In a 2006 meta-analysis involving 94 independent tests, psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that implementation intentions had a meaningful positive effect on goal achievement.

Instead of simply deciding that you want to become more disciplined, you establish specific responses in advance. For example, if your daily loss limit is reached, you immediately close your trading platform. If a setup doesn’t meet your predefined conditions, you don’t enter. If you miss an opportunity, you wait for the next valid one rather than chasing the market.

These decisions are made when you’re relatively calm, rather than during moments when emotions might influence your judgment.

I think this is incredibly valuable because many trading mistakes happen when we already know what the correct decision should be, but temporarily convince ourselves to do something different. Perhaps you’ve experienced several losses and begin considering increasing your risk, or you’ve been sitting in front of the screen without finding a valid opportunity, and suddenly a mediocre setup starts looking unusually attractive.

I’ve gradually tried to remove as many of these decisions as possible from my own trading. My approach is built around very simple concepts now I understand clearly and there are very limited opportunities to participate. I also give myself some space to apply my intuition to my trading, but this is whole different story - there I play with intuition, but about that in some other newsletter. Do not change intuition for impulse.

The practical takeaway: Instead of trying to become someone with extraordinary self-control, build a trading process that requires less self-control in the first place. Identify situations where you frequently make mistakes and decide how you’ll respond before those situations occur.

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V - Exceptional Traders Know When to Do Nothing

There’s an interesting contradiction in trading because we’re often rewarded for inactivity, even though inactivity can feel remarkably uncomfortable.

Most of us grow up believing that more effort and activity should produce better results. If you want to improve at something, you’re generally encouraged to work harder, practice more, and take advantage of every opportunity available.

Trading challenges that instinct because participating more frequently doesn’t automatically increase your expected returns. In fact, additional activity can introduce unnecessary risk, transaction costs and opportunities for behavioral mistakes.

In their 2000 paper, Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth, researchers Brad Barber and Terrance Odean examined the behavior of individual investors and found that the most active households experienced substantially worse investment performance than less active households.

Although the research focused on individual investors rather than specialized intraday strategies, I think the underlying principle is important: activity itself doesn’t create value.

This is particularly relevant today because we’re constantly surrounded by trading content, market commentary, and screenshots of people making money. It’s incredibly easy to feel like you’re missing opportunities simply because everyone else appears to be participating.

One of the biggest improvements I’ve made in my own trading has been becoming comfortable with having very little to do. Some days there isn’t a valid opportunity and while that might have frustrated me years ago, I increasingly see it as a normal part of following a selective strategy.

The difficult part is that doing nothing doesn’t produce immediate evidence that you’ve made a good decision. There’s no profit to celebrate, no trade to screenshot and sometimes no tangible result at all. Yet avoiding a trade that doesn’t meet your conditions can be just as important as executing one that does.

The practical takeaway: Start evaluating the opportunities you reject, not only the trades you execute. If your strategy requires specific conditions, respecting their absence is part of executing that strategy correctly.

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Final Thoughts

When we’re beginners, we’re naturally attracted to the idea of discovering something extraordinary. We want to find a unique strategy, develop an almost supernatural ability to read the market, or reach a level where uncertainty no longer affects us. But the longer I’ve been involved in trading, the more I suspect that exceptional performance comes from becoming unusually good at a relatively small number of ordinary things.

Understanding your strategy deeply, questioning your assumptions, accepting uncertainty, managing risk, and executing consistently might not sound particularly impressive when written down. Yet doing those things for years, especially when the results aren’t rewarding you, is considerably more difficult than it appears.

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that becoming exceptional doesn’t necessarily mean becoming the most profitable trader in the room. There will always be people taking more risk, experiencing better periods, or generating returns that look extraordinary from the outside. Comparing yourself with those outcomes can become an endless distraction from the things you actually control.

What interests me much more today is whether I’m becoming a better decision-maker, whether I understand my own behavior more clearly, and whether the process I’m building is more robust than the one I relied on a year ago.

Perhaps becoming exceptional is less about discovering something nobody else knows and more about consistently doing what most people already know they should be doing, but struggle to execute.

Thank you for reading this special free edition of Flow Journal+. I hope it gives you a better idea of the direction I want to take with these longer newsletters. If you found the research, connections and practical ideas valuable, I’d genuinely appreciate your support through a paid subscription, which allows me to dedicate more time to exploring these topics while continuing to publish the regular Flow Journal for everyone.

See you in the next letter.

Luke

If you liked this newsletter here is some other you might like:

Thank you for your support!

Sources:

For anyone interested in exploring the research discussed throughout this letter, here are the original studies.

1. Barber et al. (2014) — The Cross-Section of Speculator Skill: Evidence from Day Trading. Journal of Financial Markets. Research on persistent differences in day-trading performance.

2. Ericsson et al. (1993) — The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review. Research on how expertise develops through deliberate practice.

3. Wason (1960) — On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Research on confirmation bias and hypothesis testing.

4. Bailey et al. — The Probability of Backtest Overfitting. Research on how historical optimization can produce misleading trading results.

5. Kahneman & Tversky (1979) — Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica.Foundational research on decision-making under risk.

6. Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) — Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Meta-analysis examining how predefined behavioral plans improve goal achievement.

7. Barber & Odean (2000) — Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth. Journal of Finance. Research on trading frequency and investor performance.

I think this is what greed actually looks like for most traders. It’s usually not as obvious as risking half your account on one position because you want to become a millionaire next month. It can be much more subtle, and that’s probably what makes it dangerous. You have a good month and immediately start calculating what the same performance would look like with twice the risk. You take profit exactly where you planned, watch the market continue without you and somehow feel disappointed about a trade that made you money. You make 3R and instead of being satisfied with the execution, you think about the 7R that was theoretically available if you had managed everything perfectly.

I’ve experienced all of this myself, and that’s probably the strangest thing about greed in trading. It can take something objectively good and make it feel bad, simply because there was theoretically something better available.

There is always more money you could have made

Almost every profitable trade could have been better. You could have entered a little earlier, used a bigger position, held longer, added on the way or taken profit closer to the exact high or low. Once the move has already happened, finding the perfect way you could have traded it is incredibly easy, and if you judge your actual performance against that imaginary version of the trade, you will almost never be satisfied.

Imagine risking $500 and making $1,500. You close the trade, everything went according to plan and there is really nothing to complain about, but then the market keeps moving for another hour and you realize that holding the same position would have made you $4,000. Nothing about the $1,500 you actually made has changed, yet somehow it starts feeling smaller. Instead of comparing the result with the $500 you were willing to lose, you’re now comparing it with $4,000 that was never yours in the first place.

I’ve caught myself doing this many times, and when you really think about it, the whole exercise is completely ridiculous because there is no logical place where it ends. Why should I be disappointed about missing $4,000 when I could also be disappointed that I didn’t enter at the absolute bottom, use five times more size and exit at the exact top? There is always some hypothetical version of the trade that would have made more money, and there will always be some trader somewhere who happened to capture more of the move than you did.

I think greed is actually more dangerous when you’re winning

People usually associate bad trading psychology with losing. You take a few losses, become frustrated, start revenge trading and eventually make the situation worse. I’ve obviously experienced that side of trading too, but I think winning can mess with your decision-making in a much quieter way because when you’re making money, you have much less reason to question what you’re doing.

A few good trades can completely change the way you perceive risk. The amount that felt perfectly reasonable two weeks ago suddenly starts looking small, so you begin calculating what would happen if you doubled it. Maybe you’re close to a payout, a new account high or some financial target you’ve set for yourself, and you realize you could reach it much faster if you just pushed slightly harder while things are going well. The logic can sound perfectly reasonable in your own head because you’re not increasing risk after losing; you’re increasing it because you’re trading well.

This is where greed becomes difficult to recognize because it can look almost identical to confidence. You tell yourself you’re simply taking advantage of good conditions, but the next trade doesn’t know that you won the previous five. Your setup doesn’t suddenly have a higher probability of working because you’re feeling good about yourself, and the market definitely doesn’t care that another winner would make this your best month of the year.

I’ve learned that making money can mess with your head just as much as losing it. A losing streak can make you question every decision you make, while a winning streak can make you stop questioning yourself entirely, and neither state is particularly useful if it starts changing a process that was supposed to remain relatively consistent in the first place.

Risk is where I notice greed the most

I’ve spent enough time trading funded capital to know how tempting it is to calculate everything in dollars. If I’m risking 0.35% and the strategy is profitable, it’s incredibly easy to look at the numbers and think about what would happen at 0.5%, 0.75% or 1%. Nothing about the strategy itself has to change, so mathematically the answer seems obvious: if the same trades are taken with more size, the returns should simply become bigger.

Mathematically that is true, but psychologically it can become a completely different strategy. A loss at a comfortable risk level is just another loss in the sample. I can close the platform, continue with my day and come back tomorrow without thinking too much about it. Put enough money on exactly the same setup and suddenly I might start watching every candle, calculating the dollar amount, questioning the entry and thinking about whether I should move something because I don’t want to take the full loss.

You change at that moment and this is why I don’t think risk should only be viewed through the question of how much your account can mathematically survive. There is also an amount of risk that you can survive while continuing to behave normally, and that number is probably more important than whatever maximum position size your risk calculator tells you is acceptable.

This became much clearer to me after going through longer losing periods. Risk that feels tiny after three winners can feel completely different after ten losses, and I would much rather use a position size that allows me to remain roughly the same person through both environments than constantly push toward the maximum amount I think I can tolerate. Smaller risk isn’t exciting, it doesn’t make the individual wins look particularly impressive and it makes growth slower, but staying around long enough for an edge to actually play out has become much more important to me than maximizing every opportunity.

Greed also makes you see trades that aren’t there

Another version of greed I’ve experienced has nothing to do with position size or holding winners too long. Sometimes it’s simply the expectation that because I showed up to trade today, I should make money today.

You sit down, open the charts and spend an hour waiting, but nothing really happens. There isn’t a setup you particularly like and technically the correct decision is incredibly simple: don’t trade. The problem is that making zero dollars after sitting in front of a screen for two hours doesn’t always feel like a productive day, so you start paying slightly more attention to things you would normally ignore. Something that looked mediocre twenty minutes ago suddenly seems interesting, you find another reason to justify it and eventually you’ve built enough of a case to click the button.

I’ve done this before. You can convince yourself that you’re being flexible, reading the market or adapting to the conditions, when the real reason is much simpler: you wanted a trade to happen.

The market obviously doesn’t know that you’re behind for the month, close to a payout, trying to recover yesterday’s loss or simply bored because nothing has happened for the last ninety minutes. Those numbers and expectations exist entirely inside your head, but once they become important enough, they start affecting what you see on the chart. When you desperately want an opportunity to exist, you become surprisingly good at finding reasons why something qualifies.

I think this is why one of the most important things I’ve learned is to become comfortable with making nothing. There are days where the best result I can get from the market is literally zero, and trying to turn that zero into something positive can very easily turn it into something negative instead.

Social media makes “enough” almost impossible

I also don’t think greed exists in isolation anymore because we constantly see what everyone else is supposedly making. You can have the best month you’ve had in a year, open your phone and within five minutes find somebody posting a payout larger than your annual income. Whether the screenshot is real, whether they risked an insane amount to make it or whether they blew three accounts before getting that payout usually isn’t visible. You just see the number, and suddenly your own result doesn’t look quite as impressive as it did five minutes earlier.

I’ve been around trading social media for years, and I know how easy it is to let those numbers change your perception of what normal progress should look like. There will always be someone with a bigger account, a bigger payout, a better month, more funded capital or some ridiculous return that makes your own trading look slow in comparison. If your definition of enough depends on what everyone around you appears to be doing, I don’t think there is any amount of money that will eventually satisfy you because the reference point keeps moving.

This gets especially interesting once you become profitable because before that, the objective is relatively clear. You just want to stop losing money and figure out how to do this consistently. Once you start making money, the target becomes much less obvious. If you make $5,000, why not $10,000? If you make $10,000, someone else made $50,000. If you reach a certain amount of capital, there is always another account size above it.

There is no natural finish line in trading. You have to create one yourself, at least temporarily, otherwise every achievement immediately becomes the starting point for the next thing you think you need.

A lot of greed is probably just impatience with dollar sign

The longer I do this, the more I think greed and impatience are much more closely connected than they initially appear. You might have a strategy that works, sensible risk management and a process you can execute consistently, but if the growth isn’t happening as quickly as you imagined when you first got into trading, there is an enormous temptation to accelerate it.

That acceleration can take a hundred different forms. More risk is the obvious one, but it can also mean taking more trades, trading additional sessions, adding another market, opening more accounts or trying to run multiple strategies at once. None of those things are automatically bad, but I’ve noticed how easy it is to add complexity for no other reason than being dissatisfied with the speed at which something already working is producing results.

Trading makes this particularly difficult because you can physically see money moving in front of you all day. You can open NASDAQ and see hundreds of points of movement, then calculate how much money you could have made if you captured even a small part of it. There is this constant feeling that opportunity is everywhere and therefore every move you don’t participate in represents money you somehow missed.

But seeing a move and having an actual edge to capture it are completely different things. I don’t need everything the market offers. I need a small piece that I can take repeatedly without destroying myself in the process, and accepting that has probably done more for my trading than constantly trying to figure out how to squeeze another few percent from it.

Probably it’s not problem with your ambition

I don’t want this to sound like I’ve somehow become detached from money and no longer care about making more of it, because that would be complete bullshit. Of course I want more. I want to grow my capital, improve my trading and see how far I can eventually take it. I don’t think ambition is a problem at all, and without some level of it I probably wouldn’t have spent this many years trying to make trading work in the first place.

Where I think it becomes dangerous is when what I want in the future starts changing the decision I’m supposed to make right now. If my normal risk is 0.35% and I suddenly increase it because one particular setup feels too good to waste, that’s a problem. If my plan tells me to exit and I ignore it because I want another few thousand dollars, that’s a problem too. The same applies when there isn’t a trade but I manufacture one because I want to finish the day green.

My financial goals can determine where I eventually want trading to take me, but they shouldn’t determine whether I click buy or sell on a random morning. The market has absolutely no idea how much money I want, what my monthly target is, whether I’m close to a payout or how much somebody else posted on Instagram yesterday. None of those things change the opportunity sitting in front of me, even though they can very easily change how I perceive it.

After more than six years in the market, I don’t think the solution is to eliminate greed completely or pretend that money doesn’t matter. Money obviously matters, and wanting more of it is probably one of the reasons most of us started trading in the first place. What I am trying to get better at is keeping that desire as far away as possible from the individual decisions I make.

Sometimes I’ll take profit and watch the market continue another 200 points without me. Sometimes I’ll have a great month and know that I could have made twice as much with more risk. There will also be days where I spend my time waiting and finish with absolutely nothing because the market didn’t give me what I wanted.

I’m becoming increasingly okay with all of that because trying to extract everything from the market has never made me a better trader. Usually it has done the opposite. The periods where I trade best are generally the periods where I’m satisfied taking my piece, accepting that somebody else will always make more and understanding that I don’t need to maximize every single opportunity for this to work over a long enough period of time.

I still want more from trading in the future. I just don’t want that desire deciding what I do on the next trade, because I’ve learned enough times already that when what I have stops feeling like enough, I’m usually much closer to giving something back than I am to making more.

Bless you all.

Luke

The strange thing is that after thousands of hours looking at charts, hundreds of trades, managing more money than I ever expected when I started and going through periods where I felt completely in control followed by periods where seemingly nothing worked, I don’t think trading well has that much to do with knowing more anymore. In fact, some of the biggest improvements in my trading came when I started doing the exact opposite: analyzing less, making fewer decisions and deliberately removing things I once thought were necessary.

There is also something fundamentally broken about the way we learn to trade. The market can reward a terrible decision with thousands of dollars and punish a perfect decision five times in a row, which means that if you judge yourself the way your brain naturally wants to, you can literally become a worse trader while believing you’re improving. Psychology and behavioral-finance research gives us some interesting clues about why this happens, but it took me years of actually trading to understand what it means in practice.

And that eventually changed the question I ask myself completely. I stopped being so interested in “How do I make more money from trading?” and became much more interested in “What does it actually mean to trade well?” The difference sounds almost pointless until you understand it, but I think it is one of the most important distinctions I’ve learned in six years of doing this.

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Whenever something isn’t working, our first instinct is usually to look for the problem somewhere inside the charts. Maybe the strategy needs another filter, maybe the market has changed, maybe I should change the timeframe, backtest another year of data, journal more or somehow find that one mistake that explains why my results aren’t where I want them to be. I have done this countless times myself, because looking for a technical problem is comfortable. It gives you something specific to fix.

Think about how a normal morning looks for most people now. You wake up and probably check your phone before you even properly get out of bed. There is a notification, so you answer it, then you see something else, open Instagram for a second, someone sent you a Reel, you watch it and before you know it you have consumed twenty completely unrelated pieces of information. Then maybe you check X, Discord, Reddit, YouTube or whatever else you use, and your brain has already jumped between dozens of different things before you even had breakfast.

I am definitely guilty of this myself. Sometimes I pick up my phone because I genuinely need to answer one message and twenty minutes later I realize I am watching some completely random shit that has absolutely nothing to do with why I opened the phone in the first place. The funny thing is that I often can’t even remember what I watched five minutes later, but somehow I still spent those five minutes doing it.

And when you look at it from the perspective of trading, the contrast is pretty ridiculous. For most of the day we are training ourselves to expect something new every few seconds, and then we sit in front of the market and expect ourselves to patiently do nothing.

We are becoming terrible at being bored

I trade a very specific period of the day, I know roughly what I am looking for and sometimes the market simply doesn’t give me anything worth taking. Even when I do enter a trade, there often isn’t much for me to do afterwards. I already know my risk, I know where I am wrong and at some point the trade will either work or it won’t. Watching every candle form doesn’t change any of that.

This sounds incredibly simple when you write it down, but sitting there and actually doing nothing is surprisingly difficult, especially when you have spent the rest of your day doing the complete opposite.

We barely have empty moments anymore. If you are waiting five minutes for a train, you pull out your phone. If you’re waiting for food, you check something. If you are sitting on the toilet, obviously the phone is coming with you. You can even be watching a movie and the second there is a slightly boring scene, somehow you find yourself checking Instagram at the same time.

There is almost always something available to fill the smallest moment of boredom, and I think we underestimate what that does to us.

Because then you open the charts and suddenly there might be nothing interesting happening for an hour. You know you should wait, but your brain doesn’t really want to wait. It wants something to happen, so you start looking a little harder. Maybe this setup is good enough. Maybe you could enter slightly earlier. Maybe there is something on another timeframe. Maybe you should check another market. Maybe you missed something.

At some point you can convince yourself that almost anything is a trading opportunity

I noticed this in my own trading

There have been periods over the years when I was much better at simply leaving trading alone. I would do what I needed to do, take a trade if there was one, close the charts and continue with my day. I didn’t feel the need to constantly check what NASDAQ was doing afterwards, whether I would have been stopped out by a few points, whether the market eventually moved in my direction after I exited or what I potentially missed later in the session.

Those periods usually felt much better mentally, and I don’t think it was because I suddenly became some perfectly disciplined trader. Trading simply occupied less space in my head.

After spending this many years in the markets, I obviously know that staring at a chart harder isn’t going to make it move in my direction. Checking my P&L every few minutes doesn’t improve the position and knowing what happened twenty minutes after I closed the platform usually changes absolutely nothing. Yet it is still incredibly easy to fall back into checking behavior, especially when the rest of your life already consists of constantly checking things.

That is actually what interests me most about phones and social media. I don’t really care about the usual argument that scrolling Instagram wastes your time. Of course it does, but wasting thirty minutes isn’t going to destroy my life. What bothers me more is the possibility that I am spending the rest of my day training exactly the kind of behavior that I am trying to avoid when I trade.

I don’t want to spend hours switching between apps, notifications, messages and random pieces of content and then somehow expect my brain to become patient just because there is now money on the line.

Your brain doesn’t reset when you open TradingView

I think we sometimes treat trading psychology as if it exists in its own little box.

You can spend the entire morning distracted, sleep badly, check your phone every three minutes, constantly switch between tasks and consume an insane amount of information, but the moment the trading session starts you expect yourself to become this completely different person who can patiently wait for one specific setup and execute it without emotion.

It doesn’t make much sense when you think about it.

You are still bringing the same brain to the charts.

If you are constantly training your attention to move toward whatever is new and interesting, that tendency doesn’t disappear when you open TradingView. The chart simply becomes another source of stimulation, except now there is money attached to it, which makes the whole thing much more powerful.

And trading already has a pretty fucked up feedback system by itself. You can make a perfect decision and lose money, then make a terrible decision the next day and get rewarded for it. Sometimes you have to repeat the same boring process for weeks before you have any idea whether what you’re doing is working.

That environment requires patience almost by definition, but we are living in an environment that is slowly removing patience from everything.

Maybe this is part of why people overtrade

I always thought about overtrading mainly as a discipline problem. You have a plan, you know how many trades you’re supposed to take and you break the rules anyway, so obviously the solution is to become more disciplined.

I still think that is true, but I think there can be something underneath it as well.

Taking a trade immediately gives you something to care about. Your P&L starts moving, every candle suddenly matters, there is uncertainty, there is risk and you now have a reason to check the chart every thirty seconds. Compare that with waiting for a setup, where you might spend an hour looking at absolutely nothing interesting.

One is extremely stimulating and the other one is incredibly boring.

I have experienced that feeling myself many times, especially after sitting through a session without taking anything. There is this subtle feeling that you should have done something, because otherwise it feels like you just wasted two hours sitting in front of a screen. You start looking for reasons why maybe that one setup was actually valid after all, or why you could loosen the rules a little bit today.

But that is one of the weirdest parts of trading as a job. You can sit at your desk for two hours, make zero trades, earn zero dollars and have done your job perfectly. There aren’t many jobs where doing absolutely nothing can genuinely be the best possible decision you could make that day.

And if your brain has become uncomfortable with ten seconds of boredom, good luck asking it to sit there for two hours.

I am not going to tell you to delete every app

I don’t believe that deleting Instagram and buying a Nokia is suddenly going to make anyone profitable, even though deleting all socials from my phone helped me a lot in life and trading too. If your strategy doesn’t work, it still won’t work. If you have no risk management or you’re taking completely random trades, your screen time isn’t the biggest problem you have.

But I do think we underestimate how much our behavior outside the market eventually appears inside it.

Patience isn’t something you only use when trading. Neither is focus. Neither is your ability to experience discomfort without immediately reacting to it. These are things you are practicing throughout the entire day, and I have started paying much more attention to that in my own life.

I don’t want to become the person who can’t sit somewhere for ten minutes without reaching for a screen. I don’t want every empty moment to automatically mean that I need to consume something, check something or entertain myself. Not because I suddenly think technology is evil, but because I know what kind of person I need to be when I sit down to trade.

I need to be okay when nothing is happening. I need to be able to see a market that isn’t giving me what I want and leave it alone. I need to be able to take a loss without immediately needing another trade to replace the feeling it created, and I need to accept that sometimes the best thing I can do for my trading is close the platform and go live the rest of my life.

After all these years, I am becoming more convinced that this is a much bigger advantage than people think. Everyone wants more information, better entries, another indicator, another strategy and another opinion about where the market is going next, while the ability to simply sit there and not touch anything feels almost too boring to be considered an edge.

Maybe that’s exactly why it is one.

Because while everyone is getting better at consuming, checking, reacting and constantly doing something, trading still rewards the person who knows when to do absolutely nothing.

And your phone might be training you for the exact opposite.

Bless you all.

- Luke

And also it is reason why 90% will lose money in the markets.

You can just watch youtube videos, take the opinions of others and invest/trade based on their opinion - or you can do that, but you should blame yourself for any decision you made. Even those decisions you made based on the research of someone else. Just have some self-reflection. I can’t understand this.

Anyway, you are probably also wondering why this email landed in your inbox on a completely different day than usual. It is not Sunday, and this is not a regular Flow Journal issue.

After six years in the markets, I wanted to write something a little different.

I want to show you exactly how I am looking at Bitcoin right now, what I think about the current crypto situation, the orders I have recently entered (with proof), where I am interested in adding more exposure, where I would start taking money off the table, and - most importantly - what would make me admit that my current idea is wrong.

I am tired of seeing “BTC looks bullish long term” nonsense analysis over the internet.

I’ll show you the actual levels, the actual orders and the plan I am personally following with my own money.

So, let’s get into it.

Read more

My trading journey is pretty wild ride. My first year I had my fist funded account and I broke my first expectations even further I thought would be possible. Made my first good money when I was studying, so I was not that poor student anymore - I now had money and was eager to leave the school to pursue trading career. Hopefully I didn’t do that.

I - It is boring even more than you can imagine

I know you have heard it multiple times already that trading is boring when it is only thing you do - but most of people who are saying that, did not live it enough or just say it because it sounds cool. I really went through that and you can’t even imagine how boring it was.

Day started, woke up whenever I wanted, had a breakfast, took a look on the chart, did anything just to waste time because I was waiting for New York session to open. I did a lot of productive work as well, I was working on this newsletter, reading and working out in the gym.

Sounds awesome right?

I was thinking that as well - first 2 years. Maybe it was because I was not too rich to really live the life trading should be about - expensive cars, travelling all the time, wasting money on nonsense. I wasn’t that at all. I had decent money monthly, saved some also and just living normal life. At one time it became basically purposeless. I felt like the multi-millionaire who sold the company and was just “at the end” of his career life. Sounds weird, but that’s how it felt. I was just guy in the room who was trading, had no obligation on meeting anyone, everyone around me was working on something - either business or basic 9-5 and I had nothing to do. My only job was to trade. To trade, make money off it and repeat.

I watched a lot of anime, played games, just wasted the time.

At the beginning it felt awesome, but since I am the guy who just wants to get better and see some progress - it killed me inside. I was feeling like the boat without sailor. I was simply on the ocean of the markets, going in the direction it guided me. I couldn’t control it.

So if you are idolising how awesome it has to be a full-time trader and do nothing - you probably never did “nothing” and never had “nothing” to pursue. It’s much worse than you think and if you do not know you will be making millions daily (I did not make that lol), you will probably feel the same way I did. I was not just sitting at home and doing absolutely nothing, I went on the trips, I was travelling, part of this was the almost 3 months trip in Asia, but I still felt this way.

Maybe you would feel similar or it would be great time for you, I do not know, that’s just my experience.

II - In the worst time, your performance will decrease dramatically

The other thing is that when I needed it the most, I basically stopped making money. It could be because of the market cycle, market change overall, the edge stopped working or most likely because I just started to suck at making important and fast decisions as I did before. When the only thing you do is to make decisions in the markets - you will get better at it. Consistency in that is awesome. But imagine it’s only thing you do. Everyday you just take those decisions. If you should enter or not. If you should close the position or not. How much risk to put on this specific position and why. Why do you feel that this position is not good enough for entering? - All these types of decisions, I was just flooded daily with it. I got simply overwhelmed. So I started to suck at it.

Do the math, I said that I made money monthly and had some money saved - so now I stopped making money monthly and lived just off the money I saved. This was not so bad at all, I had over one year decent amount of monthly expenses saved, but when you switch into paying daily things from saved money - without the income - your thinking just changes. You start to think more on what you are doing. You feel like you are just wasting money. Even though I told myself that this is the reason why I saved so much - for the case like this so I am not totally ruined and can continue to trade, but it felt the way it felt. It was horrible.

Month by month, drawdown was increasing on all my funded accounts and even though I had biggest account ever I realised that without making profit it is for nothing. It’s just number on the screen which makes me feel even more sick from myself that I can’t make money from it. It was never ending cycle of realising this and finding hope that I will make it back somehow. Then it came. My biggest loss streak ever. I took 36 losses in the row. Not good timing. Not good timing at all.

I do not think there is good timing for that, but I think there are some better situations it can happen to you and worse, I think this was the worse time for that. I basically was running out of money after 3 years of pretty good life from trading (totally bored but atleast I had money lol) the next year was about to break me. Followed my plan to the T as gurus always say and was waiting for my edge to start working again - the losses have to go away right? If you follow the edge long enough it will just change and start working again. I made money with this edge. Right? Was far from truth.

I have blown all my accounts - lost my only income I had.

For the second time.

III - The stress will outweigh the time freedom

Time freedom. You hear it all over the space. Those who did trading for real and do not live just from the selling nonsense would argue that the time freedom is paid with your mental health at some point.

Just imagine.

You have all the time in the day, sounds awesome right? But what about the days when you put in the work, you did trade. You entered the trade. You tried your best and executed flawlessly based on your strategy. But even so, you got loss and now you are in drawdown - but the expenses are still present. They will never go away. So your only option is to go from your savings, there is nothing you can do. Just accept the fact that you can put in hundreds of ours in upcoming months and you can be on the zero - or even worse, below the zero. That’s what happens in trading.

“Hardest way to make easy money” - this sentence explains trading pretty well. Looks easy when you are starting, you just simply do not know what you do not know. There is just so much stuff you need to know, that you accept the fact you now know what to do - that’s absolutely false. Better to accept the fact that you will never know. That’s what I do.

Sounds cliché to speak about trading this way, but I am honestly pretty tired of everyone telling you how awesome it is to be full-time, mostly because they never were full-time and probably never will. Statistics speak for itself. There is no doubt, that only 3% people can live off trading for extended period of the time (more than 3 years), somehow I did so and I am telling you this, quite paradoxical. But that’s just how it is.

I switched to part-time and my trading is blooming. I wouldn’t say that I have the best performance I had, but I feel the best in terms of my psychology. I am not stressed to push the button, I now do it just like 1-2 times a month and I am absolutely OK with that. I can just chill.

Bills are paid. No matter my performance, I do not need to waste my savings on that - I can invest it. That’s pretty nice change for my life. Life feels much more chill now.

I am not saying you not to go full-time ever, but just have different expectations and most importantly have some savings ready, you will probably need it.

IV - You will be alone

All the time in the world - but other people will be living their normal lives without you - they need to work or study. You do not need any of it.

Look around, how many people are full-time traders or even real traders around you? How many people do you know that are trading in your country? Have you met them anytime? I think that answer is clear.

Now imagine you are just trading, you have nothing to do except of doing your own stuff and you would like to see someone, they will be just busy with their life. Doing normal stuff. Doing what everyone, except you, is doing. You are just weirdo who doesn’t need to go anywhere, see anyone, do anything and somehow makes money. No surprise people will ask you what you are doing, if you are not selling drugs or anything. It just doesn’t make sense for society.

Since 2020 when I started trading I simply haven’t met a single person who would be doing trading full-time as I was. Never, but suddenly when you open social media there will be full-time traders all over the place. It might be easier to fake it for most of the population but what I see is just trash. And imagine that you are doing it “right way”, you just trade, do not deceive people about anything and all other people who do not know what trading is see just those fake gurus promoting non-sense materialistic style of life.

Just live your life, do trading on the sidelines until you really have a lot of capital to trade with - I mean so much capital that for example 1% could pay you your yearly expenses. I have tried it with couple of hundreds thousands in Funded Capital and I have to say, that I was full-time, but it was not as dreamy as I thought it would be. I enjoyed some parts of it, but when the drawdown hit, it was one of the most stressful parts of my career I ever had.

Bless you all.

- Luke

Even though the amount itself isn’t significant, I take this as a pretty big step forward and I’m genuinely excited about what might happen next. It’s nowhere near the biggest withdrawal I’ve ever made from trading, and if I only looked at the number, there wouldn’t really be much to write about.

For years, prop firms were a huge part of my trading journey. They gave me access to capital I didn’t have myself, allowed me to scale much faster than I otherwise could have, and eventually I reached the point where I was managing hundreds of thousands in funded capital. I’m grateful for that because without prop firms, my journey probably would’ve looked very different.

But exactly here comes the difference.

You can have a $100k, $200k or even much larger funded account displayed on your dashboard, but it will be always demo funds. There are rules you have to follow.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I made money from prop firms, learned a lot through them and I still think they can be an incredible tool for traders who don’t have much capital.

I just feel that I need to try something different.

Over the last few years, I’ve started caring much more about building something that exists outside of that world. I wanted a real track recordthat I could point to over time, something based on my actual performance rather than how many challenges I could pass or how much “funded capital” I could collect.

And eventually, I want my trading to be backed by people who trust me with their own money.

Every real trader I have listened to, they have one thing in common - they have track record verified on 3rd party company. I do not mean verified with some no name company who just tries to build the status for the trader, I mean like real institutional verification that the trades you took were executed in real environment. That’s whtat I am focusing on now.

It’s real trust. Something what tells if you are really good trader or not. You can’t argue with the person if he shows that track record.

That’s probably why requesting this withdrawal felt more significant than some much larger payouts I’ve received in the past. Financially, it is not something huge, but in terms of where I want my trading career to go over the next few years, it feels like the first small piece of something I’ve wanted to build for a long time.

What could demotivate you on this approach is definitely the slow scaling. I am not the guy who would make 1,000% in one year, but I do pretty stable and consistent gains.

When I was younger in trading, the numbers were incredibly exciting to me. Getting another $100k funded account felt like progress because the number on the dashboard became bigger, and naturally I wanted to keep pushing that number as high as possible. I was never the “flip the account” trader, but I also liked huge RR trades and was validating my skill based on that.

I eventually the point on my journey when I got humbled pretty quickly and I am now happy for that, even if it was tough times. Was more humbled in the expectations than to not be greedy. As it is often said, we often remember the bad times and we are looking at it with different scope than we did before. At the present moment it looks like exciting story. The story you want to tell. But when you lived throught that, it hurt as hell.

But it gave me a lot.

I got into the slow game. I mean very slow game. I’d rather build something for years that has a real foundation underneath it: a track record that gets longer every month, capital that grows because somebody trusts the results behind it, and eventually a situation where I don’t have to keep proving myself by passing another challenge.

One withdrawal doesn’t prove anything and I’m definitely not writing this as some kind of victory lap. There will be drawdowns, bad months and probably plenty of moments where this whole thing progresses much slower than I’d like it to.

But I think it’s important to notice the small moments when you’re moving in the direction you actually want to go.

For me, this is one of them.

Let’s see where it goes.

Bless you all.

- Luke

“I really spent a lot of my life waiting for one BIG MOMENT when everything would change.”

You probably felt it too. I definitely did.

I always wanted to have the BIG moment in my life when something drastically changes overnight. The older I get, the more I realize it’s bullshit. Significant changes are usually built through consistency, not some acute change of circumstances. You probably won’t become a millionaire overnight. You won’t suddenly gain all the knowledge needed to become a scientist who cures cancer. I could continue with examples forever.

Big things just take time.

I asked myself why I used to think that way and why I wanted that moment so badly. Most likely, I wanted the praise or some kind of confirmation from others that what I was doing mattered. A big event is visible. People notice it. You can point at it and say, “See? This is why all of it was worth it.”

Consistency doesn’t give you that very often.

I took this thinking into trading as well, but I can now say that I don’t feel it nearly as much as I did before. I value consistency more than ever, but that only came with experience, I think. The more I failed and the more losses I took, the easier it became to focus on the long-term game instead of constantly waiting for something to happen.

A great example is paying to build my track record month by month. My results are pretty normal, so financially there isn’t some huge outcome from it right now. I’m literally paying money to build something that might help me access more capital in the future - and I’m speaking in years.

I couldn’t even imagine thinking like that before. Before, everything was about now. Best-case scenario was today, maybe next month, definitely not two years from now.

That changed. And I’m happy it did.

As cliché as it sounds, the more dependent you are on the outcome of your actions, the more stressed you will be. Just do the work. It becomes much easier to continue when you don’t expect every action to immediately give you something back.

I don’t expect much anymore. As depressing as that might sound, it works for me. Maybe it will work for you too.

This year was a huge change for me because I started working as a Business Developer and my schedule changed completely. Before that, I had been trading full-time for around four years combined, and one thing I can tell you is that it’s incredibly hard to stay objective when your only job is trading and you’re dependent on its outcome.

Every losing month matters more because it directly affects your life. Every drawdown feels heavier. You start putting pressure on something that already has enough uncertainty built into it.

Ironically, having less time for trading made trading occupy less space in my head.

I do my preparation, I take the trades I’m supposed to take, I record them, and then I have other things to do. Trading doesn’t have to give me anything today. My track record doesn’t have to suddenly explode. I don’t need one incredible month that proves I’m finally good enough.

I just need to keep building.

And I think this applies to almost everything else I’m doing now. The newsletter doesn’t need to suddenly reach 100,000 readers. My work doesn’t need to turn into some massive opportunity next month. My trading track record doesn’t need to attract capital tomorrow. Even those vegetables I was watering won’t suddenly be ready because I decided I want them now.

You give something the right conditions, take care of it, and wait.

Maybe that’s the part I misunderstood for a long time. I thought patience meant sitting around and hoping something eventually happens. But real patience is actually pretty active. You keep doing the boring things while accepting that you have very little control over when they finally turn into something meaningful.

There probably won’t be a single morning when I wake up and everything is suddenly different.

And I don’t really need that anymore.

If something meaningful happens in two or three years because of what I’m repeatedly doing today, that’s enough for me.

Big things just take time.

Bless you all.

- Luke

P.S - You might have noticed that I changed my nickname to thelukekube, the reason behind it that I do not feel like flow trader anymore. I just want to be myself. Glad you are here and reading about my journey. We are already one year in, let’s see what will be next!

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.

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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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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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