I have been thinking quite a lot lately about how much of trading performance actually has nothing to do with trading itself.
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
Great Research. It's true, sometimes i need to wait for whole week for a good setup. However most of the people think they can be better in trading without focusing on personal life.