There’s a kind of loss in trading that’s especially easy to overlook.
Every day, you watch the charts, read articles, study indicators, and your bookmarks keep piling up. Someone talks about breakouts, so you study breakouts; someone talks about trends, so you study trends. Someone makes money with short-term trades, and you start thinking about short-term trading too. But when you look back at your own trading records, it’s still the same few mistakes: chasing a move, failing to hold on, trying to ride out losses, and taking profits too early.
Later, I went through my own trading history and noticed something interesting.
The trades that really cost me were the ones I thought I’d already figured out. Because I thought I understood them, I was willing to take bigger positions. Because I’d been right a few times before, I was willing to bet early again.
The more I learned, the bolder I sometimes became. So later, I started doing the opposite. When I came across a new method, I didn’t rush to try it with real money. I put it on a watchlist first and observed it over dozens of occurrences to see whether I could actually understand it. If I couldn’t understand it, I left it alone. If I couldn’t clearly explain why I was entering a trade, I left it alone. If I had to scramble for an indicator to give myself courage, I left it alone too. After a while, I actually seemed less knowledgeable than before. I stopped discussing which indicator was the best with everyone all the time, and couldn’t be bothered to predict whether prices would rise or fall the next day. But my own trading records started to become clearer: why I entered, what went wrong, when I exited, and how it turned out.
That’s when I realized that the truly difficult thing about trading isn’t that the market is too complicated. It’s that people always want to cram every complicated thing into their own heads, then imagine that this will help them make fewer mistakes. In reality, it’s often the opposite. The more scattered information you know, the easier it is to find excuses for yourself when placing a trade. Truly useful knowledge doesn’t make you eager to trade every market move. It helps you understand why you can choose not to trade this one.@程总趋势论
Every day, you watch the charts, read articles, study indicators, and your bookmarks keep piling up. Someone talks about breakouts, so you study breakouts; someone talks about trends, so you study trends. Someone makes money with short-term trades, and you start thinking about short-term trading too. But when you look back at your own trading records, it’s still the same few mistakes: chasing a move, failing to hold on, trying to ride out losses, and taking profits too early.
Later, I went through my own trading history and noticed something interesting.
The trades that really cost me were the ones I thought I’d already figured out. Because I thought I understood them, I was willing to take bigger positions. Because I’d been right a few times before, I was willing to bet early again.
The more I learned, the bolder I sometimes became. So later, I started doing the opposite. When I came across a new method, I didn’t rush to try it with real money. I put it on a watchlist first and observed it over dozens of occurrences to see whether I could actually understand it. If I couldn’t understand it, I left it alone. If I couldn’t clearly explain why I was entering a trade, I left it alone. If I had to scramble for an indicator to give myself courage, I left it alone too. After a while, I actually seemed less knowledgeable than before. I stopped discussing which indicator was the best with everyone all the time, and couldn’t be bothered to predict whether prices would rise or fall the next day. But my own trading records started to become clearer: why I entered, what went wrong, when I exited, and how it turned out.
That’s when I realized that the truly difficult thing about trading isn’t that the market is too complicated. It’s that people always want to cram every complicated thing into their own heads, then imagine that this will help them make fewer mistakes. In reality, it’s often the opposite. The more scattered information you know, the easier it is to find excuses for yourself when placing a trade. Truly useful knowledge doesn’t make you eager to trade every market move. It helps you understand why you can choose not to trade this one.@程总趋势论