I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions during my years of trading, and when I look back at some of them, many had something surprisingly simple in common. I wasn’t necessarily trading badly because I didn’t understand the market, because my strategy wasn’t good enough or because I suddenly forgot everything I had learned. Sometimes I was trading badly simply because I wanted more than the market was currently giving me, and instead of accepting that, I slowly started changing the way I traded to get it.
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