Becoming a Better Trader

You Can’t Improve What You Keep Defending

Some traders ask for feedback, then spend the entire conversation explaining why they don’t need to change anything.

Over the past year of writing on Substack, I’ve had a lot of traders reach out with questions or ask for help.

Some are incredibly humble, grateful, and receptive. They listen, ask thoughtful questions, and genuinely consider what you’re saying.

But in my experience, that hasn’t been the majority.

The moment the feedback challenges something they believe or something they did, the defenses go up.

“Yes, but…”

“The reason I didn’t take that trade was…”

“I still don’t think that setup was clear enough…”

An explanation for every decision. An objection to every observation. Very little willingness to consider that their interpretation might be what needs work.

And the most revealing part is where that pushback comes from.

You might expect it from traders who have studied the great trading books, spent years practicing, and developed a different perspective through experience.

But that hasn’t been my experience in these conversations. The resistance has come from people who haven’t studied the foundational work and whose questions reveal that they’re still struggling with the basics.

There’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced. Every one of us started there.

But you have to consider that the work you haven’t done might explain what you’re not seeing.

I used to laugh when Mark Minervini expressed his frustration with this. After a year of these conversations, I understand it much more personally.

It’s difficult to help someone improve when every suggestion becomes something they need to defend themselves against.

One of my greatest strengths as a developing trader was being willing to hear uncomfortable feedback from people with more experience than I had.

That didn’t mean every criticism felt good. It meant I was willing to study it, test it, and consider that someone else might see something I couldn’t yet recognize.

I wanted to get better badly enough to admit I had things to learn.

And I still do.

I didn’t invent a single chart setup I trade.

I have preferences. I’ve developed variations that fit my personality and approach. But when I teach, I deliberately focus on the established foundations before adding the nuances of my personal style.

These patterns and principles have been studied and written about for decades, with roots stretching back roughly a century:

• William O’Neil’s How to Make Money in Stocks

• Robert D. Edwards and John Magee’s Technical Analysis of Stock Trends

• John J. Murphy’s Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets

• Richard W. Schabacker’s Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits

• William Jiler’s How Charts Can Help You in the Stock Market

There is a substantial body of work available to learn from.

Yet when a trader struggles to recognize a setup, the conversation often becomes a list of reasons the chart didn’t look exactly the way they wanted.

At some point, you have to ask yourself:

“Am I missing what the market is showing me because I’m too attached to what I expected to see?”

You don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback. You should ask questions and think critically.

But there’s a difference between trying to understand an observation and immediately searching for reasons to dismiss it.

Missing a trade is normal. Passing on something you don’t understand is reasonable. No setup guarantees a winning outcome.

The problem is repeatedly defending your interpretation without examining whether it needs to improve.

The market is not going to redraw the chart until you feel comfortable.

Supply and demand will continue to unfold whether you recognize the opportunity or not.

Your job is to develop the skill to read what’s there.

And that starts with being willing to admit you might not be seeing it clearly yet.

You’re Copying the Trade Without Understanding the Trader.

Two things completely derail new traders:

They misunderstand time frames, and they mix incompatible risk-reward expectations.

They see someone posting a setup, explaining an entry, or taking a profit, and immediately try to apply it to their own trading.

But they never ask whether that person is trying to make the same type of trade.

Even the label “swing trader” doesn’t tell you enough.

One swing trader might hold positions for only a few days. Another might hold for several weeks. One might typically place stops 1–3% below entry. Another might allow 4–7%.

Now add position traders looking to hold for many weeks or months, and the differences become even greater.

Two traders can study William O’Neil, Mark Minervini, David Ryan, and Dan Zanger and still develop very different approaches. Shared influences don’t mean identical entries, holding periods, or exit rules.

For example:

One trader might use a stop 2–3% below entry, accept frequent small losses, and take profits around 12–15%.

Another might allow 6–8% from entry to stop, plan to hold considerably longer, and look for a 20–30% advance before taking an initial partial profit.

Those are illustrative approaches, not universal rules. And those stop percentages describe the distance from entry to stop, not the percentage of the account being risked. Position size determines that.

The problem starts when a beginner borrows pieces from both without understanding how they fit together.

They allow the wider loss but keep taking the smaller profit. They buy an entry designed for a short burst and expect a sustained advance. Or they plan to hold for months, then panic because a short-term trader sold after three days.

They’re mixing approaches before mastering one.

Your holding period, entry technique, stop placement, position size, average gain, and win rate all need to work together.

Before copying a trade or applying someone’s advice, ask:

• What is their typical holding period?

• How far is their initial stop from entry?

• What are their average gain, average loss, and win rate?

• What price action are they using to enter and exit?

• Does that approach match the trade I’m trying to make?

Social media puts all these approaches in the same feed. A trading room can put them in the same conversation.

That doesn’t make them interchangeable.

Learn from other traders. Study their reasoning. But understand the complete approach before borrowing individual rules.

Know your time frame. Know your risk-reward profile. Know whose advice actually fits your style.

You Don't Have Enough Lifetimes to Learn Every Market Lesson the Hard Way.

It would take me multiple lifetimes to learn everything about the markets through trial and error alone.

That's why I've spent years studying the greatest momentum and growth stock traders in history.

Do I still learn through my own experiences, failures, and mistakes? Absolutely.

But why spend years learning a painful lesson when someone before me has already learned it and written an entire book about it?

Think about this.

Take 1,000 traders and throw them into the markets to figure everything out themselves. Take another 1,000 who first study the principles, successes, and failures of history's greatest traders.

Which group would you bet on?

As a father, it reminds me of raising my sons. You can teach them something a hundred times, explain why it matters, and show them exactly what to do. Yet sometimes, they insist on learning the hard way.

Years later, they finally understand what you were trying to teach them all along.

Adults aren't much different.

What amazes me is how many traders refuse to learn from previous generations because they believe the markets are somehow completely different today.

Markets evolve. Technology changes. But many of the underlying principles of speculation, risk management, and human behavior have stood the test of time.

Being willing to learn from others isn't a weakness. It's a strength.

You're going to make plenty of mistakes of your own. That's inevitable.

But by learning from those who came before you, you can avoid repeating many of those mistakes, and perhaps prevent some altogether.

Why insist on learning every lesson the hard way?

Two Traders. Same Market. Same Opportunities. Completely Different Results.

Over 100 years ago, Richard Wyckoff shared a fascinating story in Studies in Tape Reading.

Two traders started out watching the same ticker, trading the same small positions. One eventually built a fortune. The other never progressed beyond trading ten-share lots.

What separated them?

Wyckoff believed the difference came down largely to their mental qualities, discipline, and ability to interpret what the market was telling them.

He emphasized several principles:

• Study price and volume to understand supply and demand.

• Recognize accumulation, distribution, and changes in leadership.

• Control fear, greed, anxiety, and recklessness.

• Protect capital and manage risk.

• Study your mistakes relentlessly.

• Develop what he called a "trading character."

Here's what I find fascinating.

More than a century later, we have advanced charting software, sophisticated screeners, thousands of indicators, and now AI.

Yet traders still struggle with the same problems Wyckoff wrote about.

They chase tips, fight trends, abandon strategies, refuse to cut losses, and allow emotions to dictate decisions.

The technology has changed. The market has evolved. But human nature hasn't changed.

Perhaps the greatest edge in trading isn't discovering something nobody else knows.

It's developing the discipline to consistently execute principles that successful traders have understood for over 100 years.

That's exactly why I built the MTS Course around principles that have stood the test of time.

If you're tired of chasing gimmicks, following hype marketers, and searching for the next "hot new strategy," maybe it's time to stop searching for something new and start mastering what has worked for generations.

That's what the MTS Course is designed to help you do.

https://tradingmomentum.substack.com/p/momentum-trading-strategy-the-100

“You Only Matched the S&P 500. Why Even Bother Trading?”

A lot of traders are chasing superperformance.

But there's something about trading performance that I think gets overlooked far too often.

When someone spends an entire year actively trading and finishes with returns comparable to the S&P 500, you'll inevitably hear:

"Could've just bought SPY and saved yourself the trouble."

Maybe, but have you looked at how much risk that trader took to achieve those returns?

Consider a hypothetical example.

The S&P 500 finishes the year up 11%, but experiences a 20% maximum drawdown along the way.

Another trader finishes up the same 11%, but their maximum portfolio drawdown was only 5%.

Same return. One-quarter of the drawdown. Completely different return-to-drawdown profile.

Peter Brandt discusses this relationship extensively in Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader. Van K. Tharp emphasizes evaluating returns relative to maximum peak-to-trough drawdowns. And in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards, Marty Schwartz makes it clear how much importance he places on controlling the downside.

These traders understood that performance isn't just about how much money you make. It's also about the risk involved in making it.

Now, does one year of lower drawdowns automatically make someone a better trader? Of course not.

But maybe that trader isn't trying to achieve 100% annual returns.

Maybe their objective is to preserve capital, minimize drawdowns, generate reasonable returns, and enjoy something they're genuinely passionate about.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I'll continue pursuing superperformance, but I also recognize that not every trader has the same objectives.

Before dismissing someone's trading because they merely matched the market, consider what they accomplished relative to the risk they took.

How much you made is only half the story. How much you had to risk is the other half.

Stop Calling Your Comfort Zone Your Personality

“Choose a trading style that fits your personality.”

Good advice, but there’s a fine line between knowing yourself and using “that’s just who I am” to avoid working on your weaknesses.

Imagine someone who knows exactly what career they want, but pursuing it requires public speaking. They’re terrified of speaking in front of people, so they walk away from something they love and justify it by saying, “It doesn’t fit my personality.”

Maybe the career fits them perfectly. Maybe public speaking is simply a skill they need to develop, and the discomfort is worth overcoming to do what they truly love.

Trading is no different. Your temperament, strengths, schedule, and goals should influence how you trade, but even a strategy that suits you will demand things that don’t come naturally. Taking a planned loss. Waiting patiently for a setup. Resisting the urge to chase. Feeling uncomfortable doesn’t automatically mean you’ve chosen the wrong style.

Sometimes you need to adjust your approach. Sometimes you need to work on yourself. The hard part is being honest enough to recognize which one applies.

No one else can draw that line perfectly for you, but before you dismiss something as “not my personality,” ask yourself: Does this genuinely conflict with my strengths and goals, or am I avoiding a weakness I need to overcome?

Most Traders Don’t Need Another Indicator. They Need to Read These Books.

If you can't read price and volume, identify leadership, recognize a proper setup, screen for the stocks and industry groups actually in play, and define your risk before entering, more indicators probably aren't going to fix your trading.

One thing that has surprised me on Substack is how many traders are missing these foundational skills and are trying to trade live money.

Some can't identify a proper cup with handle or VCP. Others know the pattern names but don't understand what they're actually looking for underneath them: supply and demand.

A constructive setup often shows the same basic characteristics: strong price action when demand is present, weaker volume as the stock pulls back or moves sideways, tightening price action as supply dries up, and renewed demand as the stock moves through its pivot.

If these are gaps for you, you don't need to reinvent anything.

Start with:

William O'Neil:How to Make Money in Stocks

Mark Minervini:Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard and Think & Trade Like a Champion

Anna Coulling:A Complete Guide to Volume Price Analysis

Stan Weinstein:Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets

Then use Edwards & Magee, John Murphy, Schabacker, Jiler, and Momentum Masters to go deeper.

But reading isn't enough. You have to run screens, study hundreds and eventually thousands of charts, review your trades, study your mistakes, and repeat the process until you can recognize these characteristics almost instinctively.

The books give you the blueprint. Screen time builds the skill.

A losing trade can be well executed. A winning trade can reward terrible behavior.

If you judge every decision solely by whether it made money, you can end up reinforcing the very habits that eventually hurt you.

In Super Trader, Van Tharp gives us a useful question to ask at the end of the day:

“Did I follow my rules?”

Start there. Then review your results across a series of trades. You need to know whether you’re following your process and whether that process is actually working.

Brett Steenbarger makes a related point in Positive Trading Psychology: when we make trading responsible for satisfying our ego and need for recognition, letting go of outcomes becomes much harder.

And that is where so much avoidable pain comes from.

You need to be right. You need to make back yesterday’s loss. You need this stock to prove you’re a good trader. You need one big winner to change everything.

You’ve made one position responsible for far too much.

Now you’re moving your stop farther away to avoid taking a loss. You’re forcing entries to make money back. You’re cutting winners for emotional relief and holding losers because accepting the loss feels personal.

Trading becomes a remarkably effective form of self-inflicted psychological torture when you put that much weight on one position.

A stock hitting your stop does not make you a failure. You can feel disappointed, take the loss, and still follow your plan on the next trade.

Get comfortable taking a planned loss. Keep your risk manageable. Give your winners room to develop. Build confidence through consistent execution and honest review.

Your next trade is one trade. Stop asking it to carry your entire future.

You Can’t Master What You Keep Abandoning.

No strategy works equally well in every market.

You can learn that from experienced traders who’ve been writing about it for decades, or let the market teach you the expensive way.

There will be stretches when your strategy is crushing it while another struggles. Then conditions change, and the roles reverse.

That’s the nature of markets. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can stop searching for a system that always works.

But what do many beginners do?

The moment their strategy struggles, they chase whatever is working right now. Then that strategy struggles, and they switch again.

New indicators. New setups. New gurus.

Constantly starting over. Never developing enough experience to understand what they’re trading.

At some point, you have to commit to learning a process, measuring its results, and understanding the conditions that help or hurt it. A difficult stretch alone doesn’t tell you whether the edge is gone.

Yes, some experienced traders use multiple strategies and shift between them as conditions change. But they’ve put in the work to understand those approaches and establish rules for when to use them.

Adapting from experience is different from switching out of frustration.

Before you abandon your strategy, ask yourself:

Has the evidence changed, or has my patience run out?

Somebody Wins the Lottery Every Week.

Minervini has made this point for years: somewhere in the market, there’s a stock going up.

But the existence of a winner doesn’t mean you have a strategy for finding and trading it.

Somebody wins the lottery, too. That doesn’t make buying tickets a sound financial plan.

Yet plenty of traders approach the market exactly that way. Chase whatever is moving, hope for a big winner, and mistake the occasional payoff for proof of skill.

A winning trade is not proof of a repeatable edge.

The real question is whether your process produces positive expectancy over a large number of trades. After accounting for losses and costs, does it make money?

That requires more than finding a stock that goes up. It requires repeatable criteria for entries, exits, position sizing, and risk management.

Are you building a process you can repeat, measure, and improve, or just buying another ticket?

You Came Here to Become a Better Trader. You May Leave With Much More.

In Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards, Ed Seykota said:

“Yes, the winning traders have usually been winning at whatever field they are in for years.”

That line goes far beyond trading.

A great student. A dedicated athlete. A successful business owner. Different pursuits, but often the same underlying habits: discipline, preparation, accountability, and a willingness to improve.

We love the stories of high school dropouts and people working ordinary jobs who become exceptional traders. But the important part of those stories is what they did to get there.

They changed their behavior before they changed their results.

Many people come to Momentum Trading Strategy to learn growth-stock momentum trading. That’s what we teach. But I believe one of the biggest benefits is something you might not initially recognize:

An environment built around behaviors that help you succeed throughout life.

We talk about:

• Confidence with humility. Believe in yourself while accepting that you have more to learn.

• Big goals backed by daily work. Ambition means little if your behavior stays the same.

• Process and honest review. Study what you do well and confront what needs to change.

• Openness to feedback. Listen to uncomfortable truths without immediately defending yourself.

• Emotional awareness. Recognize what you feel without letting every feeling dictate your next decision.

Those habits can strengthen your business, your relationships, and your ability to master another craft.

And I would argue that trading can raise the bar even higher.

A successful doctor, lawyer, engineer, or athlete can still struggle in markets. Success elsewhere doesn’t automatically transfer. Trading requires new skills and can expose blind spots that another profession never forced someone to confront.

The need to be right. Impatience. An unwillingness to accept uncertainty. Taking mistakes personally.

Working through those weaknesses can benefit far more than your account. Learning to accept feedback, own a mistake, and respond thoughtfully under pressure can benefit your family and everyone around you.

Even risk management carries over.

You begin thinking more carefully about how much to commit, what you can afford to lose, and whether the potential reward justifies the downside. You become more willing to try, fail small, learn, and take another chance when the upside is worth pursuing.

You don’t have to arrive as someone who has always been winning. But you have to be willing to change the behaviors that keep holding you back.

That’s one of the most beautiful opportunities in trading: the work you do on yourself can keep paying off long after you close the charts.

I’d Take a 40% Return Over 100%. Here’s Why.

Big returns are the goal. But a profitable outcome doesn’t justify behavior that can destroy an account.

Consider two hypothetical traders over the same full year:

• Trader A: Returns 100%, but suffers a 60% maximum equity drawdown while oversizing positions and ignoring planned exits.

• Trader B: Returns 40% with a 10% maximum equity drawdown while following position-sizing and exit rules.

I would favor Trader B. I want a process I can keep repeating.

Two metrics help me evaluate that:

1. Calmar ratio: Annualized compounded return divided by maximum drawdown over the same period. Using the same equity-measurement method, these traders’ one-year ratios are 1.67 and 4.0. Trader B earned more return relative to the drawdown experienced.

That drawdown should reflect account equity, including open profits and losses. A closed-trade report can hide declines that recovered before exit. Intraday observations can also reveal losses missed by daily snapshots.

2. Maximum adverse excursion (MAE): How far an individual trade went against you while it was open.

A stock bought at $100, held through $75, and sold at $115 produced a 15% gain with a 25% price MAE. That isn’t automatically a 25% account drawdown, but it raises a question: Did you follow your risk plan?

Jack Schwager writes in Unknown Market Wizards:

“Return levels only have meaning in context of the risk undertaken to achieve those returns.”

Peter Brandt explicitly advocates Calmar as a measure of performance relative to risk. And Mark Minervini writes:

“My goal, as always, is to minimize risk and maximize my potential gains.”

The older I get, the more I care about improving that balance.

Positions need to be large enough for winners to matter and controlled enough for losses to remain manageable. Calmar and MAE help evaluate that balance, although neither reveals every risk.

I want substantial returns earned through a process that protects my ability to keep trading.

The Trading Work You Avoid Could Be Costing You

If you’re struggling with trading or not getting the results you want, take an honest look at the three pillars: risk management, trading psychology, and strategy & tactics.

Are you giving each one the time and effort it deserves?

It’s easy to spend hours studying charts, finding setups, and refining entries. But how much time goes into improving your position sizing, reviewing your mistakes, or understanding why you abandon your plan under pressure?

One or two recurring weaknesses can undermine an otherwise sound approach. Taking too much risk. Refusing to accept a small loss. Repeating a mistake you never stop to examine.

And the areas we neglect are often the ones we least want to work on.

Imagine what could change if you gave risk management and trading psychology the same attention and commitment you give your strategy.

Which pillar have you been neglecting, and what’s one thing you can work on this week?

Before You Blame the Strategy, Show Me Your Last 20 Trades.

“O’Neil doesn’t work anymore.”

“Minervini is outdated.”

“That stuff only worked back then.”

Maybe start with a harder question:

Have you actually followed the strategy well enough to evaluate it?

I’ve received messages from traders ready to dismiss an entire approach before they’ve learned its rules, studied their results, or understood the conditions it requires.

These principles have deep roots. In How to Make Money in Stocks, O’Neil studies market leaders stretching back to the 1880s. Minervini describes building on historical winners and studying the great traders before him. Different generations have refined recurring lessons about leadership, price and volume, risk, and human behavior.

Early in my own journey, I spent countless hours trying to prove them wrong, only to keep finding flaws in my own understanding and execution. I was trying to disprove rules I hadn’t consistently followed. Funny how that works.

That history doesn’t make any strategy immune to scrutiny, but scrutiny requires evidence.

Before blaming the method, audit yourself:

• Market conditions: Are you forcing trades in an environment your strategy is poorly suited for? A method built around sustained advances will struggle when breakouts repeatedly fail.

• Expectations: If your approach can be profitable with a 30–40% win rate because winners substantially outweigh losers, why are you demanding a 70% win rate? Do you understand its expected losing streaks?

• Position sizing: Are you taking so much risk that ordinary losses become financially or emotionally unbearable?

• Exits: Are you cutting winners before they can offset your losses? Are you widening stops after entry and allowing one oversized loss to erase multiple gains?

• Execution: Can you identify a valid setup, explain the price and volume action, and define where the trade is invalidated before entering?

• Review: Do you know your average win, average loss, win rate, and how consistently you follow your rules?

Minervini dedicates an entire section of Think and Trade Like a Champion to knowing the truth about your trading. As he puts it:

“Your results are your personal truth.”

I’ve offered some of these traders a straightforward starting point: send me your last 20 trades, and let’s review them.

Sometimes those trades never arrive.

I can’t know why, but without examining the evidence, we’re left debating opinions while the actual problem remains unidentified. Twenty trades won’t establish a strategy’s long-term edge, but they can reveal repeated execution mistakes.

Among those who have shared their trades with me, I’ve almost always found violations of several basic rules. Some initially felt defeated by that realization, but their willingness to face the evidence gave them something useful: specific mistakes they could correct, potentially saving years of repeating them.

I try to approach this with empathy. I don’t know what pressure someone is under or how urgently they need money. That pressure can make patience and objectivity difficult.

But becoming a trader requires learning to lead yourself.

That includes me. When I’ve struggled, I’ve often found that I drifted from my process and violated the same rules the Market Wizards teach and I emphasize myself.

When conditions deteriorate, I know I should reduce size, trade less, and sometimes move entirely to cash. There have been times when I ignored that and paid the price.

Paul Tudor Jones explains it plainly in Market Wizards:

“When I am trading poorly, I keep reducing my position size.”

Good execution can still produce losses. Strategies don’t work equally well in every environment. Accountability means understanding those realities and examining how you responded.

The spiritual teacher Sadhguru’s idea of becoming a “blissful failure” captures something valuable here: pursue ambitious goals wholeheartedly without making your inner peace dependent on every outcome.

For trading, that means accepting that you can do the work, execute properly, and still lose on the next trade.

Get comfortable being wrong. Get rigorous about finding out why.

You cannot improve what you refuse to examine.

Anyone can spot a winner after it doubles.

The skill is recognizing the setup before the move.

When you only study charts after stocks explode, you’re training your eye to recognize the result, not the conditions that preceded it.

Try this instead:

• Pull up a former market leader and hide the breakout and the run that followed.

• Use chart replay to move forward one bar at a time, studying the developing base.

• Before revealing the move, ask: Would this stock interest me without knowing what happens next?

Look for tightening price ranges, higher lows, shallower pullbacks, and volume drying up.

Not the giant green candle. The behavior that came before it.

A scanner can narrow your list, but it cannot do these repetitions for you. That takes deliberate chart study, repeated across many examples.

Some of You Need More Study. Others Need More Mastery.

Some people open a brokerage account, follow a couple of YouTubers, and think they’ll figure out this trading thing as they go.

Trading requires serious study, just like any other profession. There’s no shortcut around building that foundation.

But there’s another group that has already read the right books and studied successful traders. Their problem isn’t a lack of information. They haven’t learned to consistently apply what they already know.

Have you read How to Make Money in Stocks once, or have you studied it repeatedly? Have you worked through Minervini’s books and Weinstein’s Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets until you can explain the principles, recognize them on a chart, and use them to make decisions?

I’d take mastery of five great trading books over a surface-level understanding of 100.

I’ve read more than 30+ myself, But I keep coming back to the same handful. I’ve gone through them over and over, and I still revisit them today. Familiarity with the words isn’t the same as mastery of the material.

For some of you, the next step is more study. For others, it’s going deeper into what you’ve already studied.

But rereading alone won’t make you a trader. You have to practice, review your decisions, and correct your mistakes.

Think crawl, walk, run:

• Crawl: Build your foundation. Study one sound approach. Work through historical charts. Learn what qualifies as a setup, where you would enter, where you would exit, and how you would control risk. Use a simulator to practice putting those decisions together.

• Walk: Trade small with real money. Put that process into practice with an amount you can afford to lose. Learn to follow your rules while dealing with the actual emotions of gains and losses. Keep records, review your trades, and continue deepening your understanding of the material.

• Run: Gradually scale up. Apply the same principle we teach with progressive exposure: build on success. Commit more capital as your execution and results justify it, while keeping your exposure appropriate for market conditions. If your trading deteriorates, scale back.

I see value in simulated trading as a starting point. If you can’t consistently follow your rules in a simulator, adding real money isn’t going to magically create discipline.

But being profitable in a simulator doesn’t automatically mean you’re ready to trade meaningful money. Once fear, greed, and the discomfort of actual losses enter the picture, you have another skill to develop.

You don’t need to know everything before taking a small trade, but you do need a plan, defined risk, and the discipline to learn from what happens.

Reading another book won’t automatically fix the same execution mistake you keep making, and trading bigger won’t fix a process that isn’t working.

Study the material. Master the principles through practice and execution. Review your execution. Earn the right to scale.

But what do I know? 😉

You Need Experience to Recognize Expertise

One of the hardest parts of learning to trade is figuring out who is actually worth learning from.

People who don’t know what they’re doing can look incredibly knowledgeable to people who don’t know what they’re doing yet.

Confident predictions. Complicated indicators. Fancy charts. Screenshots of P&L. It can all look like expertise when you haven’t developed the experience to evaluate it.

Meanwhile, someone talking about probability, position sizing, and cutting losses can sound unimpressive.

I think this partly explains why I didn’t find O’Neil, Minervini, and Zanger right at the beginning. By the time I discovered them, I certainly didn’t have trading figured out, but I had enough experience, including enough mistakes, to recognize the value in what they were teaching.

I knew enough to realize they were worth studying deeply.

The more experience you gain, the more your questions change. You start asking how someone manages risk and losses, and how different position sizing strategies affect their results.

That’s the unfortunate part of trading. Some people find the right teachers early. Others spend years stumbling in the dark before they know enough to recognize useful guidance.

My takeaway from my own experience and reading the Market Wizards books was that a large majority seemed to spend five to ten years finding their footing. Two things stood out to me: time spent following the wrong guidance and the stubbornness to keep repeating their own mistakes.

Among those who progressed sooner, some were fortunate enough to join the right firm, find the right mentors, and learn a sound process from the start. They still had to do the work, but they had the right direction much earlier.

Others seemed to need painful losses, sometimes blown accounts, before they were finally willing to say, “All right. I’m ready to do this the right way.”

I don’t think that pain has to be a requirement, but unfortunately, it seems to be part of the process for many traders.

Finding good guidance and being ready to follow it are two different things. Some haven’t found it yet. Others already know what they should be doing but haven’t started doing it consistently.

And that leads to another problem: you haven’t committed to a method that fits you.

You want results now, but you’re bouncing from teacher to teacher and strategy to strategy. Those people may actually be giving you good advice, but you take an entry from one, a stop from another, and an exit from someone trading a completely different timeframe.

You end up with a collection of rules that were never designed to work together, with no evidence that your combination has an edge.

Exploring different approaches has its place. Most of us have gone through that while figuring out what fits our personality, schedule, and risk tolerance. But be honest about the phase you’re in. While you’re still experimenting, you can’t expect consistent profits from a process you haven’t established.

At some point, you have to commit long enough to learn a strategy, execute it consistently, and evaluate your results.

Commitment alone doesn’t guarantee success, but constantly changing the method makes it almost impossible.

You can spend years collecting trading knowledge without ever becoming proficient at applying any of it.

You Can Filter Yourself Out of Every Winner

You take a loss. Add a rule.

Take another loss. Add another rule.

Eventually, your checklist looks bulletproof. Except nothing qualifies anymore.

It feels like progress because every new restriction would have prevented a past loss. but how many future winners will it eliminate?

During a discussion with Mark Minervini, Tom Basso put it perfectly: “You’ll be 100% reliable on zero trades.”

Minervini followed with a screening example: require a stock to pass 100 parameters, and it can meet 99 of them and still never appear on your screen. That’s why he keeps his screens straightforward and basic.

A screen gives you candidates. You still have to evaluate the trade.

You need clear setup criteria, position sizing, exits, and risk limits. Those rules matter, but a losing trade doesn’t automatically mean your strategy needs another restriction. Even a properly executed trade can lose.

Before adding the next filter, ask:

Does this improve my process across many trades, or would it just have saved me from the last loss?

The Trading Metrics That Actually Tell You If You Have an Edge

Most traders know their P&L.

Far fewer know where that P&L actually comes from.

In Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader, Peter Brandt explains that his monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews go beyond the account balance. He tracks how often his trades are profitable, average profit per winner versus average loss per loser, the distribution and win/loss results of different trade categories, and the trades responsible for his net profitability.

That last one is especially important.

Historically, Brandt found that roughly 10% of his trades accounted for his net trading profits. The remaining trades included winners and losers that, collectively, largely offset one another.

His trading plan also expected only about 32% of trades to be profitable in a typical year. Over shorter periods, he noted that the figure could fall to 15%–20%. Those were characteristics of his approach, not targets for everyone to copy.

A low win rate doesn’t automatically mean you have a bad strategy. A high win rate doesn’t automatically mean you have a good one.

What matters is the relationship between how often you win, how much you make when you’re right, and how much you lose when you’re wrong.

Then comes the deeper question: Which setups are producing those results?

A profitable month can hide an unprofitable habit. One category of trades may be making the money while another keeps taking it back.

That’s what your trading journal should help you uncover.

Not simply, “Did I make money this month?”

But:

• Which setups made the money?

• What’s my win rate for each setup?

• How large are my average winners compared with my average losers?

• Which trades account for most of my profits?

• Which types of trades repeatedly cost me money?

The purpose of tracking metrics isn’t to collect interesting statistics.

It’s to understand what deserves repeating, what needs improvement, and what may be holding you back.

That’s why I built a Trading Journal and a full suite of analytics into MTS Velocity, included with every paid Momentum Trading Strategy subscription. Not just to help you record your trades, but to help you learn from them.

You’ve already paid for the trading lessons. Don’t leave them buried in your trade history.

Are You Backtesting an Edge or Feeding a Fear?

Sometimes, the obsession with backtesting becomes a search for emotional certainty. If you keep testing because you need a system that removes every loss and every doubt, ask yourself whether you’re improving your edge or postponing the discomfort of being wrong.

No amount of research can eliminate uncertainty. Part of becoming a trader is learning to execute a tested process, accept losses, and keep risk under control. Intelligence and analytical skill alone cannot do that work for you.

The Turtle Traders offer a powerful example. Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt taught participants the same core trend-following framework, yet their results differed. Participants did not follow the methods they were taught. Others, including Jerry Parker, built enduring trading careers from that foundation.

As Richard Dennis told Jack Schwager in Market Wizards:

“I always say that you could publish trading rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.”

This applies to systematic trading, too. A well-designed system can reduce emotional decision-making, but adopting one does not automatically resolve your relationship with uncertainty. You can still skip valid signals, increase your size impulsively, override exits, or abandon a strategy during a drawdown it was designed to withstand.

Backtesting can be a valuable tool, but it cannot remove the emotional demands of trading. If you keep running tests in search of certainty, more research can become a way to postpone confronting your fear of losses or being wrong. You may improve the backtest without improving your ability to execute when real money is on the line.

At some point, you have to put as much work into yourself as you put into your backtesting.