My first real breakdown,
is not because of the loss, but because I started to retaliate against the market.
At that moment I realized, I was no longer trading.
I am desperately fighting against my own failures.
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That was a long period of sideways movement.
The market is neither up nor down,
Strategies fail one after another, yet I refuse to stop.
After each stop loss, I place orders even faster.
Not because I saw an opportunity,
but rather to retrieve what I just lost.
Later I understood, this is called emotional trading.
There's a term in psychology called 'loss aversion'.
The pain of loss for a person,
but because of the thrill of profit, more than twice.
Thus, you will do an extremely dangerous thing:
Using a greater risk to smooth over the previous loss.
Livermore repeatedly mentioned a sentence in his later years:
"My greatest enemy is not the market, but myself."
That sentence is not a summary, but a will.
I remember there is a story in (Zhuangzi's) Dazheng:
Craftsman Ziqing carves wood into tools,
Seven days of fasting, forgetting oneself and then becoming capable.
What Zhuangzi actually wanted to say is just one sentence,
When the mind is not calm, the hands must be chaotic.
That night, I turned off the trading software,
For the first time in the market, I chose to 'do nothing.'
That feeling is very empty, very uncomfortable,
But it was also the first time I truly stood outside the market,
See clearly your position.
I wrote these down in my notes,
Later, it saved me time and again:
1) Revenge trading is a signal of psychological imbalance, not an opportunity. When you think 'I need to make it back right now,' the market is already far away from you.
2) After continuous losses, the correct action is to exit. It's not about changing strategies, but changing states.
3) Trading is not fighting, it is waiting. Experts win in patience, not in frequency.
4) You cannot control the market, but you can control 'not participating.' Not participating is, in itself, a choice.
These are not methodologies, but survivor bias. They are my experiences of standing at the edge of a cliff and retreating.
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I want to ask you: $BNB
Have you ever made the most irrational trade after continuous losses?
At that moment, what were you thinking?
