When I started trading, I thought almost everything I needed to learn was somewhere on the chart. Like most beginners, I assumed the difference between me and someone consistently making money was mostly knowledge, so naturally I spent an insane amount of time trying to learn more, backtest more and understand more.
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