Trading Psychology & Mindset

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.

The Easiest Way to Spot a Beginner Trader

They're searching for certainty in a game built on probabilities.

• Will this stock go up?

• Which way will the market go?

• Will this setup work?

• Is the market going to crash?

Almost every trader goes through this phase. It's practically an initiation into the markets.

The problem is that many investors never move beyond it.

Here's what experienced traders eventually understand:

Mark Minervini doesn't know whether his next trade will work. Warren Buffett doesn't know whether his next investment will succeed. Neither does anyone else.

They can identify favorable opportunities, assess the odds, and make educated decisions. But they cannot know the outcome.

Especially in a sideways market. Nobody knows with certainty whether the market will break higher into a new advance or roll over into a Stage 4 decline.

And if someone claims they know for certain, I'd recommend running the other way.

And here's the part that changes everything:

You don't need to know what's going to happen next to make money in the markets.

You need to understand probabilities, expected value, risk management, and the mathematics of compounding.

Consider venture capital.

A venture capitalist might evaluate 100 promising companies and invest in only 10. Even after extensive research, many of those investments could fail to return their original capital.

But the portfolio doesn't necessarily need most of them to succeed.

One extraordinary winner can potentially generate enough returns to offset all the failures and produce substantial profits.

The same fundamental mathematical principles apply to trading.

You can be wrong more often than you're right and still make substantial money, provided your winners sufficiently outweigh your losers.

The professional's edge isn't knowing what happens next. It's knowing how to manage the possible outcomes.

The beginner asks: "Will I be right?"

The professional asks: "What are the odds? How much can I lose? And how much can I make if I'm right?"

Bottom line: Stop obsessing over the outcome of individual trades. Follow a proven process with positive expectancy, execute it consistently, and let the probabilities play out over a large number of trades.

My trading strategy and process are built around positive expectancy. Over a large number of trades, that gives me a mathematical edge, provided I execute consistently. But it doesn't guarantee the outcome of any single trade, or even any particular series of trades.

I stopped needing to know whether my next trade would work a long time ago.

And once you let go of that need for certainty, it's incredibly freeing.

That shift in thinking is one of the biggest milestones in becoming a consistently profitable trader.

Millions Know This Trading Strategy. So Why Does It Still Work?

Here's something I've been thinking about.

I've spent years trading a strategy that's been around in various forms for over 100 years. Trend following, relative strength, price and volume, buying leading stocks, and cutting losses. None of this is a secret.

William O'Neil's How to Make Money in Stocks has sold over 2 MILLION copies. Mark Minervini has roughly 766,000 followers on X. Countless books, courses, and services teach these same principles.

So if millions of people know about this strategy, shouldn't the edge have disappeared by now?

Then I started talking to traders on Substack, and something became obvious.

• Buying a book doesn't mean you've read it.

• Reading it doesn't mean you understand it.

• Understanding it doesn't mean you know how to execute it.

• Knowing how to execute it doesn't mean you have the discipline to follow it consistently.

And even among those who have spent years studying and mastering a strategy, how many actually follow their own rules when real money is on the line?

Legendary trader Richard Dennis understood this decades ago. In Market Wizards, he said:

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

But there's another part of this that I think gets overlooked.

Even if millions of retail traders understood these principles and followed them perfectly, we'd still represent a relatively small part of the enormous amount of capital moving through financial markets.

Institutions are a major force behind sustained stock trends, and most institutional capital isn't specifically trading O'Neil-style growth stock breakouts or Minervini's VCPs. It's spread across passive indexing, value investing, asset allocation, hedging, quantitative strategies, and countless other mandates.

Even within the retail trading community, those of us following this particular style of growth and momentum trading are just one segment of a much larger population investing and trading in completely different ways.

We might feel like the majority because we surround ourselves with traders who think like us, but step outside that bubble, and you realize we're actually a minority.

So there are two important reasons a well-known strategy can retain its edge:

1. Knowledge isn't execution. Millions may know the principles, but far fewer understand and consistently apply them.

2. Popularity within a community isn't dominance of the market. Even millions of traders following the same approach can represent a small fraction of the capital and liquidity driving prices.

Maybe the edge was never knowing something nobody else knows.

Maybe it's consistently executing something most people won't, while recognizing that the market is much bigger than the trading community we live in.

I'm curious: Have you ever known exactly what your strategy required, but found yourself doing the complete opposite when real money was on the line?

Maybe You Don't Want to Quit Trading. Maybe You're Just Tired of Feeling Like You're Failing.

You've spent months, maybe years, studying charts, reading books, practicing, and putting in the work.

But the results aren't coming.

Eventually, something you once loved starts feeling like something you dread. Every loss becomes personal. Every setback makes you question whether you're cut out for this.

You start thinking about quitting.

But here's a question I want you to ask yourself:

If you woke up tomorrow with all the skills, discipline, and consistency you've been working so hard to develop, would you still love trading?

If the answer is yes, maybe you haven't fallen out of love with trading.

Maybe you've just buried that love under the pressure you've been putting on yourself.

In Mind Gym, sports psychologist Gary Mack explains how fear of failure, perfectionism, and unrealistic expectations can rob athletes of the joy they once found in their sport.

And sometimes, the harder they push, the worse they perform.

The answer isn't necessarily to work harder. Sometimes it's to step back, simplify, and rediscover why you started.

Focus on small improvements. One good decision. One properly executed trade. One lesson learned.

You can work incredibly hard at something without being incredibly hard on yourself.

And remember, progress doesn't always happen on your timeline.

Maybe you don't need to quit trading. Maybe you just need to change your relationship with it.

Have you ever wanted to walk away from something you still loved, simply because you were exhausted from trying so hard and still feeling like you were failing?

Before you give up on trading, ask yourself whether you've truly lost your passion or whether you've simply buried it beneath the pressure you've been putting on yourself.

Don't confuse being tired of the struggle with being ready to give up on the dream.

Stop Trading Other People’s Fear

Most people remember a market selloff. Far fewer carry the lesson into the next one. My trading improved significantly when I stopped forgetting what the last panic had taught me.

I put real effort into staying stoic. My politics, personal beliefs, and opinions about what should happen cannot dictate how I trade. The market doesn’t owe me an outcome that agrees with my worldview.

COVID. The 2025 tariff scare. Different headlines, same temptation to let fear take over and convince yourself that this time, there’s no coming back. Even experienced traders can become so invested in a bearish narrative that they struggle to recognize when the market starts proving it wrong.

When pessimism gets overwhelming, I start feeling like a jockey holding back a horse that wants to run. I’ve learned that some of the most prosperous trading periods emerge from the wreckage of a bear market or a major scare. The challenge is staying patient enough to wait for price to confirm the turn.

Fear gets my attention. Price gives me permission.

Everyone calling for another 1929 doesn’t mean the bottom is in. It means I need to stay alert to a change in character instead of letting everyone else’s emotions close my mind to opportunity. And when bearish voices disappear and everyone thinks making money is easy, I want to be paying just as much attention.

You don’t need an opinion on every headline. Follow price action, a few key moving averages, and the behavior of leading stocks. When the market’s character deteriorates, reduce exposure and honor your exits. When it improves and valid setups emerge, start putting money back to work.

Be more stoic. Stay flexible. Learn the lessons, and carry them into the next cycle.

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?

Get really comfortable with losing. Comfortable enough that you stop needing any individual trade to work.

I know that sounds strange, but you need to reach a point where a stock can stop you out without taking your confidence, discipline, and emotional balance with it.

Tom Hougaard gets right to this in Best Loser Wins: learn to take a loss without resentment, emotional attachment, or the need to get even.

Mark Douglas puts it plainly in Trading in the Zone:

“When you have accepted the risk, you will be at peace with any outcome.”

That is what I mean when I say you have to get to the point where you “don’t care” what happens on an individual trade.

You care deeply about your preparation. You care about protecting your capital. You care about following your rules, but you have accepted that this particular trade can fail, even when you do everything correctly.

For my approach, the framework is straightforward:

• The stock meets my criteria. Check.

• The setup is part of my playbook, with a clear entry and favorable potential reward relative to the risk. Check.

• The position is sized so I can accept the planned loss before entering. Check.

• I take the trade with an attached stop.

• I take partial profits into strength or sign of weakness. As the trade progresses, I move the stop to breakeven when my rules and the price structure justify it.

• If the stock keeps working, I give the remaining position room to run, using a trailing method such as a stop beneath higher lows or an appropriate moving average.

If it fails, I take the loss. If it works, I manage the winner.

I know that sounds almost too simple when we’re talking about exceptional performance, but these books repeatedly bring us back to the same principles: accept losses, control risk, and execute a repeatable process.

These principles have been passed down through generations of traders. The big names you hear about today didn’t invent these fundamentals. They studied those who came before them, learned from their successes and mistakes, and refined those lessons into their own approaches.

They learned these principles. They practiced them. So can you.

“To offend a strong man, tell him a lie. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth.” - Author unknown.

There’s a lesson in that for every trader.

Here on Substack and across social media, it’s easy to find people who agree with our ideas. People who like the stocks we own, support our outlook, and tell us exactly what we want to hear.

It feels good. It makes us feel right.

But growth often requires facing truths that are uncomfortable to hear.

Now, I’m not talking about trolls or people who show up just to put you down. There’s plenty of that online, and you don’t need to give it your attention.

I’m talking about educators who challenge your thinking, point out weaknesses in your process, or explain why something you’re doing may be holding you back.

Maybe they point out that you’re breaking your own rules. Maybe the stock you’re defending doesn’t fit the strategy you claim to follow. Maybe you’re looking for reassurance when you should be evaluating the evidence.

That can sting.

The temptation is to dismiss them, get offended, and retreat to the people who make you feel comfortable again. Before you do, ask yourself whether there’s something useful in what they’re saying.

You don’t have to agree with every criticism. Consider the evidence and the reasoning. Be willing to acknowledge when a point applies to you.

A losing trade doesn’t automatically mean you made a mistake. But when you have made one, “I got that wrong” needs to be part of your vocabulary.

So here’s my challenge: open yourself up to uncomfortable truths.

Listen to people who give you a reason to question your assumptions. Be willing to learn something that challenges your ego.

That willingness can help you grow as a trader, and it can carry over into every other area of your life.

The market is an expensive place to defend your ego.

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.

The Market Doesn’t Care Who You Are. And That’s a Beautiful Thing.

In life, your background, connections, appearance, and other people’s biases can open doors or close them.

In trading, you don’t need someone to like you, hire you, or decide you belong. The market doesn’t care about your race, religion, politics, or last name.

That’s an extraordinary opportunity.

Yes, big players have advantages in market making and high-frequency trading.

Get over it. You don’t have to play in those arenas. There are plenty of ways to make money without competing where their edges dominate.

Trading offers something rare: a chance to compete without first winning someone else’s approval.

Don’t use their advantages as an excuse to avoid confronting your own mistakes or putting in the work.

Stop obsessing over the edge they have. Start building yours.

I Came for the Money. I Stayed for the Game.

I came to trading to make money. Most of us did.

But somewhere along the way, what kept me here changed.

Some people stay because the occasional winner keeps them chasing the next rush, even while their account shrinks. That can become the same trap that keeps someone returning to a casino.

For others, something different happens. We discover that trading is far more difficult than we imagined, and the difficulty draws us deeper into the work. Like someone training for a marathon or mastering any craft, the challenge itself becomes part of the reward.

That theme comes through in Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards interviews:

• Mark Minervini, Stock Market Wizards: “You have to love trading.” He explains that money initially attracted him, but his motivation became the pursuit of being the best at something.

• Bill Lipschutz, The New Market Wizards: “I like the game. I think it’s a great challenge.” Asked whether he would still trade without being paid, he says he would.

• David Ryan, Market Wizards: “To me it is like a giant treasure hunt.” His satisfaction comes from finding a potential big winner before its move.

• Ed Seykota, Market Wizards: “Great traders are ones who are absorbed by the talent.” He explains that they do not merely possess the talent; “the talent has them.” Elsewhere in the interview, he credits his success to his love of the markets and describes trading as his calling.

I understand that feeling.

What hooks me goes beyond finding the next winning stock. It is the person I have to become to trade well.

Patient enough to wait. Disciplined enough to prepare. Confident enough to act. Humble enough to admit I am wrong. Willing to take a loss without turning it into a verdict on my ability.

The market has a way of exposing the distance between who you think you are and how you actually behave.

You can talk about patience until you have to sit in cash. You can talk about humility until you’re on a hot streak. You can talk about discipline until following your rules becomes uncomfortable.

And there is always more to learn. Experience improves your judgment, but it never gives you certainty. The market can still surprise you.

If this were easy, with nothing left to discover or improve, I would lose interest. There are easier ways to make money.

Momentum Trading Strategy is for people who love the game and want to do it right. People willing to study, take responsibility, and grow as both traders and individuals.

If you’re here to gamble, chase a dopamine hit, or collect stock tips without doing the work, this is not the place for you. The internet already has plenty of content feeding those habits.

What brought you to trading, and what made you stay?

A Cheetah That Chases Every Antelope Starves

Every chase costs energy. Waste enough of it on poor opportunities, and you won’t have much left when the right one appears.

Minervini used this analogy to explain selectivity: the cheetah waits for a vulnerable target before committing to the chase.

Traders face the same problem with their capital, attention, and emotional energy.

There’s always a stock ripping somewhere. Another breakout. Another chart someone posts after a huge move.

You can exhaust yourself chasing opportunities that were never yours to take.

Minervini explains that he watches stocks move every day without participating in almost any of them. Much of his return comes in relatively small windows of opportunity, but he’s always watching.

That’s the work people don’t see: screening, preparing, setting alerts, and passing on trades that don’t meet the criteria.

Waiting doesn’t mean you’ve stopped working. It means you’re prepared to act when your setup appears, with a clear entry and defined risk.

You don’t need to catch every move. Be more like the cheetah.

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.

The Entry Is Simple The Hard Part Is You

Someone asked how I manage fast-moving stocks when timing the entry and knowing when to sell can feel so difficult.

My entry and management tactics are basic: a defined entry, a stop, trailing higher lows, and selling some into strength. There’s nothing revolutionary about them. Knowing the tactics and executing them under pressure are two different skills.

I believe a big part of my improvement comes from staying calm at the entry and throughout the trade. That comes from experience. I’ve made almost every mistake in the book, and a stock moving fast no longer gets me nearly as excited as it once did.

I can sell some while the stock is still climbing without needing to squeeze out every last dollar. I can take a loss without needing to prove I was right. I still feel emotions, but they have much less influence over my decisions.

If a stock runs 150%, I can be perfectly content capturing a 30% gain. I’d rather take a trade with 3–4% initial risk and capture 30% than accept 40% risk trying to capture the entire 150%.

I don’t need the whole move. I need a worthwhile return for the risk I take, and the discipline to execute my plan.

He Sold His Winner to Keep His Loser Alive

Bernard Baruch didn’t just lose money on a bad trade. He sacrificed a profitable investment to keep funding it.

In My Own Story, he recalls buying coffee heavily on margin in 1905. When prices started falling, a respected coffee merchant advised him to hold on. Baruch listened as the losses mounted and profits from years of successful trading began disappearing.

Meanwhile, his Canadian Pacific shares had risen substantially. Instead of closing the losing coffee position, he sold those profitable shares to raise more margin money. Eventually, all his Canadian Pacific stock was gone, and coffee was still falling.

By his account, the experience cost him $700,000 or $800,000. He suffered nervous indigestion for days afterward.

He sold what was working to defend what wasn’t.

But the most important part of the story is that Baruch already knew better. He understood the temptation to sell a winner because taking a profit feels easier than admitting a loss. He knew the correct response was to let go of the bad position rather than sacrifice the good one. He did the opposite anyway.

That’s the uncomfortable lesson: knowing your trading rules is not the same as following them when money and ego are involved.

Taking profits isn’t the mistake. Selling a healthy position simply to keep an unhealthy one alive is. At that point, you’re no longer evaluating each trade on its merits. You’re reorganizing your account around the one mistake you refuse to accept.

Baruch resolved never again to take a major risk in something he didn’t understand. He also made cutting losses quickly an explicit rule.

Don’t make your winners pay for your refusal to admit you’re wrong.

Your Account Can Outgrow Your Comfort With Money

Before you ever learned to read a chart, you were learning what money meant. You learned from the bills your parents worried about, the arguments you overheard, and what the people around you considered a good income. Those experiences helped shape your expectations about what was normal, what was possible, and what you stood to lose.

Childhood experiences and inherited beliefs shape our self-image. What we repeatedly hear and experience can become what we expect from ourselves. Sometimes we carry an old definition of what’s possible into a life that has already changed.

Think about how that can show up in trading. One trader becomes overwhelmed risking $1000. Another stays composed at $10,000, while another feels that pressure at $100,000. Account size, position sizing, and exposure are all important, but so is what those dollars represent to each person.

That becomes especially important when you scale. You might follow your rules consistently at one size, then start hesitating, cutting winners prematurely, or resisting losses at the next. The percentage risk can stay the same while the dollar amount crosses an emotional threshold. Brett Steenbarger addresses this in The Daily Trading Coach, explaining how thinking in familiar dollar amounts can make increasing size psychologically difficult.

Mark Douglas describes an even more striking pattern in The Disciplined Trader: traders who make money consistently until they reach a certain threshold, then surrender their profits through decisions completely inconsistent with the trading that got them there. After the losses, they return to their usual approach, rebuild, and repeat. He connects this pattern to conflicts between the success traders consciously want and the beliefs they carry about money, work, and what they deserve.

That is one possible explanation for what looks like self-sabotage. A useful question is: When I reach that level, what changes in my decisions?

• Do I start protecting every dollar instead of following the setup?

• Do I feel pressure to make even more?

• Does a normal loss suddenly feel like a verdict on my ability or a threat to my security?

Start noticing those patterns. Keep risk within your financial capacity, increase size gradually, and track whether you can still execute your plan. Give yourself repeated experience managing the new level before increasing it again.

These are the quiet parts of trading that don’t get enough attention, yet they can undermine even a well-developed strategy. It’s difficult to accept that you could be holding yourself back when you want so badly to move forward. But wanting success doesn’t automatically undo beliefs you’ve carried for decades.

Breaking those patterns may require examining parts of your life you never expected to confront through trading: what money meant growing up, what you learned to fear, and what you came to believe was possible for someone like you. Recognizing those beliefs is the beginning. Changing their influence on your decisions takes deliberate work and repeated practice.

For the next version of you to grow, some of the old beliefs have to die. Part of that growth is rewiring what you learned to expect from yourself, so yesterday’s conditioning stops setting tomorrow’s limits.

The Market Doesn’t Owe You an Equation

A company can have exceptional earnings, strong sales, and a compelling story, yet its stock can break down weeks after the report. It may even enter a Stage 4 decline with no obvious news to explain the move. A breakout can fail when nearly everything appears to line up.

That is why I think about trading in probabilities. The comparison to quantum physics is a metaphor, but a useful one: strong evidence can improve the odds without guaranteeing the outcome. Good fundamentals do not force institutions to keep buying, and we may never know exactly why they stopped.

William O’Neil emphasized earnings and sales, but he also studied price, volume, and the direction of the market. Larry Hite’s point in Market Wizards was that a good bet can still lose. Mark Douglas made the same distinction in Trading in the Zone: an edge improves your odds across many trades; it cannot promise the result of any one trade.

This applies on earnings day, weeks later, or on an ordinary Tuesday with no headline. The fundamentals tell me why a stock deserves attention, but price action tells me whether the trade is working. I don’t need an explanation for every decline to respect it. Price is always right.

Your Gut Hasn’t Earned Your Trust Yet

“Follow your rules. Don’t blindly trust your gut.”

Early in your trading career, that is essential advice. Fear can make you hesitate when a qualifying setup triggers. Excitement can make you chase an extended stock. Comfort in a winning position can make you dismiss the signals telling you to sell.

Your emotions can pull you in the opposite direction of what your strategy requires.

Even after some success, you may still lack the experience to distinguish useful intuition from false confidence, fear, or wishful thinking.

But that doesn’t mean intuition has no place in trading. Learning to understand your feelings is part of developing judgment. You can acknowledge a feeling without automatically acting on it.

Minervini describes a “crossover.” Through disciplined practice, consistent execution, and honest review, your feel for the market can become useful. You begin recognizing changes in behavior because you’ve studied and traded through similar situations repeatedly.

Sometimes you recognize that something has changed before you can fully explain every detail.

That kind of judgment can pick up subtle information your mechanical rules may not capture.

I’m a rules-based discretionary trader. My rules provide the framework for selecting trades and controlling risk. Experience helps me interpret the action within that framework. Developing that feel takes work, and simply spending years in the market doesn’t guarantee you’ve developed it.

Ed Seykota, known for his systematic approach, expressed the distinction in Market Wizards:

“Gut feel is important. If ignored, it may come out in subtle ways by coloring your logic. It can be dealt with through meditation and reflection to determine what’s behind it. If it persists, then it might be a valuable subconscious analysis of some subtle information. Otherwise, it might be a dangerous sublimation of an inner desire for excitement and not reflect market conditions. Be sensitive to the subtle differences between ‘intuition’ and ‘into wishing.’”

That is the question worth asking: Am I recognizing something in the market, or am I feeling what I want to happen?

Wanting a stock to recover can feel like conviction. Wanting to avoid another loss can feel like a warning. Wanting action can feel like spotting an opportunity.

Experience and self-awareness can help you distinguish those reactions from useful recognition. Pay attention to what you feel, examine its source, and review the decisions that follow. Your intuition earns credibility through that process, while your risk limits remain in place.

The mistake is trying to trade with a veteran’s intuition before you’ve done the work to develop it.

There’s no shortcut. Study the market. Study yourself. Review your decisions. Over time, learning from that experience can help you develop intuition that sharpens your judgment and takes your trading to the next level.