Traders Without Faith

Whatever behavior looks like, every trader sees it the same way: sell high, buy low, and profit. It doesn't matter whether they're deceiving others, or even themselves — at their core, that's what they're thinking.

First, do a self-audit. Know who you are, then do what fits. If you're a rabbit, learn to eat carrots. If you're a wolf, learn to hunt sheep.

The earlier you make those judgments and classifications, the more important they are. The sooner you recognize who you truly are at your core, the less likely your future effort will be wasted.

Traders inherently face two dilemmas.

The first is the pain of missing out. The second is the fear of loss.

What is the pain of missing out?

You watch your best friend marry a man who's thriving — she rises with him, reaping every benefit. You're deeply jealous. The reason? He used to pursue you, and you rejected him.

What is the fear of loss?

You're with your current boyfriend. Stay, and you worry he'll lag behind. Leave, and you fear he'll take off and soar the moment he's without you.

Those two above are the unavoidable pains for every trader in the world.

Because you're not an investor. An investor is essentially committed for the long haul — married life, through thick and thin. She might become a general's wife, but she married him when he was still a captain, stood by him for twenty years, and watched him climb step by step from captain to general.

A trader just wants to make a quick buck, while simultaneously worrying about losing everything in the process.

As a trader, you have to trade enough — and only then is there a chance to grow. That's the only possibility, a necessary condition but not a sufficient one.

Many people have been trading for ten, even fifteen years. They've made plenty of trades. Yet overall, they're still losing money. Why? Because they've never developed a professional mindset. Judging by the volume of experience, you'd count yourself as an industry practitioner. But you're not approaching this like a pro. You don't have ten years of experience — you just repeated the same one day ten times over.

1、Many traders dabble in this model here, that model there. Why? Because their hands itch. If they're not doing something, they feel uncomfortable, as though there's money they're missing out on.

In reality, we understand that profit and loss share the same root.

The more you trade, the more opportunities for profit — but also the more opportunities for loss. The more you trade, the more your capital gets spread thin. In the end, you might just run around in circles and accomplish nothing.

The professionals only trade their single best model.

Models can be stress-tested and refined. Spend a year running your various strategies, chart out their equity curves, compare how each one grows your capital, and pick the winner. But most people don't do that. In their first year, instead of splitting their capital into multiple buckets and running different strategies, they simply have no strategy at all — they do whatever feels right in the moment.

2、Many traders hesitate every single day — hesitating to enter, hesitating to exit. Sometimes when emotions hit, they go heavy. Sometimes when the mood passes, they go light.

Wherever there's volatility, there's trading. Professionals, in the strictest sense, just hold a sieve and pan the market like gold panners, sifting through sand to find the gold. They use their trading system to filter profit out of the market.