r/tradingpsychology

You guys kept saying journal your trades, how much you made, you lost, your set up and analysis, when the real thing I should have been doing is journal the psychological state I was in, before, during and after the trade. Did it feel safe, did it feel vengeful, did it feel like you understood the general market and played it in your favor. The game is not that whether you were right or wrong, its whether what you feel can be trusted in the next trade as a strategy by itself rather than the setup.

I’m wondering what your day to day would be like if you are starting to learn how to trade with zero prior knowledge, morning/night routine, study hours, etc. for a long period of time.

Ive found myself homebound for the time being, due to disability and after learning of trading a few years back, I’m willing to focus 100% of my time to studying from the ground up.

Any honest and helpful advice would be awesome! ✨

I've started noticing this pattern in my trading and it's honestly frustrating.

When I'm trading well, I have no problem sticking to my plan. I'll wait for good setups, manage my risk, and I'm actually pretty patient.

Then I take one loss...

And it's like someone flips a switch.

I suddenly feel like I have to make it back. I'll start convincing myself that the next setup is good enough, even when I know it isn't.

Sometimes I'll size up because I want to recover faster. Other times I'll just keep clicking because I don't want to end the day red.

The weird part is I know exactly what I'm doing while it's happening, but I still do it.

Then an hour later I'm sitting there thinking, "Why didn't I just stop after the first loss?"

I'm starting to think my biggest problem isn't strategy at all. It's whatever happens in my head after I lose.

Has anyone actually gotten past this, or is this just part of becoming a better trader?

I’ve noticed many traders become much more aggressive after their first profitable month. They increase position size, loosen their rules, and assume they’ve figured the market out.
Have you experienced this yourself, or seen it happen to others?

I blew my funded account just because i got emotional... I did a great profit Then could not stop and did a second trade... It put me into a small loss... Then I did again a small trade to get the small loss (only 50usd!!!) back. Then this put me into a new loss and now I was down 300usd... And now.... I fully got emotional and tradet one full NQ Contract and after 5 Minutes the account was blown up I was learning and making small progress on since 10 trading days...

Those trades were 0% market context... Just seeing thing that aren't there and just fully let me reptile brain "survive" for me.

Men it sucks... at the moment were i got emotional i feelt very stressed in my hole body mixed with aggression and some kind of "I don't give a fuck anymore" mindset that gave the account the rest.

Before - following strict rules - learning each trade - improving and account was growing with some normal Drawdowns.. After - loose control and gambled the account down within a few minutes.

Im 19, started studying trading back in August 2025 and started live late January.

Went into July after the best stretch ive ever had on June, about +$15,000 in profits. and as of today, im back to being an unprofitable trader. Down a little over $14K this month, it sucks, not gonna pretend it doesn’t, but at the same time what am I gonna do? cry? quit? blame the market? (I have cried on many occasions actually)
Looking back most of it was self inflicted, holding past invalidation, holding winners too long and giving it back, expecting June style trends although the enviornment was changing, I failed to adapt and still am.
So now its back to studying, gym, work, sleep over and over again. mind you I live in the pacific so I gotta be up and ready by 3:20am. Just gotta show up again tommorow.
Im heavily disappointed in my ability, my ego, and my impulsiveness trying to “get it back”. But I am not defeated yet, if this is the “tuition” i had to pay then so be it.

its just, the constant loop of repeating mistakes is costing not only my hard earned money, but the integrity of my confidence in my playbook, every day that goes by, it breaks it a little more, and whether I want to admit it or not, the losses this month loom over me and influence what trades I take.

Anyone else getting rocked by July or is it just me? 😭

Not “I learned discipline”, the specific moment things clicked.

Mine: I kept blowing funded accounts and couldn’t figure out why, until I realized every blowup happened when I was trading under real financial pressure,needing the payout to cover life, not just wanting it. The second money got tight, my size went up and my rules got “flexible.”

What actually fixed it wasn’t a new strategy. It was removing the pressure so when I sat down at the charts I had nothing to prove that day. Almost every rule-break I’d made before came from needing the account to work, not choosing to trade well.

Curious what others found was yours a strategy thing, a psychology thing, or something totally outside trading?

Hi everyone,

I'm posting here because I honestly don't know what to do anymore.

I've been trading binary options for the past 7 years, and during that time I've lost a significant amount of money. I've tried almost everything I could think of:

Different trading strategies

Price action

Indicators

Risk management approaches

Multiple binary options platforms

Demo accounts and live accounts

No matter what I try, I eventually end up losing. Every attempt seems to end the same way.

At this point, I'm not looking for a "magic strategy." I genuinely want to understand why this keeps happening. Is it something psychological, like emotions or discipline? Is it because binary options are fundamentally stacked against traders? Or am I missing something important?

If anyone has been through a similar experience and managed to figure out what was going wrong, I'd really appreciate your advice.

Please be honest. I want to understand the real reason behind these years of losses and whether it's even realistic to continue trying.

Thanks for reading.

So guys i have begun earning, i now have a little job which pays me a little and i am thinking of investing half the money and trading with half. O wanted to know is trading a real skill or just luck

If trading is a real skill how can i learn it and what’s the best approach to learn it how should i start. Please guide me fellas i really wanna win

Been trading F&O for a bit (small capital, learning as I go) and noticed something about myself I want to sanity-check with others here.

On days I take an early loss, I catch myself doing stuff I'd never plan for -: taking a bigger position size to "make it back," entering trades way faster than usual, ignoring my own SL rules that I set the night before when I wasn't panicking on the loss.

The weird part: sometimes it works and I forget the pattern even happened. Sometimes it wrecks the rest of my week(or more 😑)

Curious if this is just me or a real thing for others here:

• Does this happen to you too? What does it actually look like for you (bigger size, more trades, ignoring SL, something else)?
• Have you found anything that actually helps in the moment . Not "just have discipline," but something concrete you do?
• Would you ever want something that just quietly flags "hey, this trade breaks the rule you set for yourself yesterday", or does that sound annoying/useless in the moment?

Trading can make you really rich 💵 📈

After 4 years of trading, I lost a lot of my family's money. I cried a fever, but I came back every time smarter and blessed. 🙏🏻

After hundreds of strategies and indicators in Telegram groups 💔

But thanks to Allah first, who finally guided me to my own secret sauce.

Then I would thank the AI tools that support me.

Thanks to 2Pac and all those songs and singers who've inspired me and pushed me not to give up since I was young.

Guys, I am on my way to being rich.

May Allah save me and my mom, dad, my wife, kids, all my family and friends, to surprise them very soon.

Guys, don't give up. Believe me, there is a way. To be always profitable, and I found it, I swear.

Maybe I can't tell you all what I found, but take this advice:

1- Trading works better with big accounts. Below 5000$ you burn your money and learn, but not to be rich.

2- Your emotions, your patience, focus on that.

3- Manage your losses and always use a stop-loss.

4- Don't give up as long as you breathe and take it seriously.

5- Take a long break when you lose all the money, don't re-deposit fast to take revenge.

6- When you start being profitable, withdraw some and use it as income. Give your family some; buy some coffee or food for yourself. Don't focus on getting rich in one day.

Thank you for your time.
“ This is not financial advice, and I'm not selling any courses or indicators”

I don't need your money 🙏🏻

Follow me; maybe sometimes I will drop more advice

Much love, y'all.
Gold father, GF

Hey everyone,

​I'm currently facing a psychological hurdle where I could use some advice from you guys. It's about the classic evaluation phase for a funded account.

​I'm close to the goal, but exactly that is triggering quite a bit of mental conflict for me right now:

• ​The urge to force it: Because the goal is so close, this unhealthy pressure creeps in to achieve it right now. This leads to impatience, annoyance over missed setups, and the temptation to force trades.
• ​The battle between logic and emotion: Rationally, I know very well that trading is a process and not a sprint, and that the system works if you stay disciplined. Emotionally, however, this artificial time pressure keeps interfering.

​How do you manage to completely switch off this self-made pressure, let go of the urge for a "speedrun," and view the whole thing purely as a disciplined training program again?

​Looking forward to your experiences and tips!

One thing I’ve realized after all these years of trading is that knowing the rules and actually following them are two completely different things.

For me, it’s usually not the strategy that loses me money. It’s breaking my own rules after a few emotional trades.

Curious, what’s the one rule you struggle with the most? Which one keeps coming back to hurt your account?

Hello,
I am a finance undergraduate student and for years i have been curious about how trading really works.

I am really curious about how you really learn how to become a good trader/investor. A lot of people online are just showing off fake results to sell courses or most probably give false signals for them to have liquidity.

I am really interested on the whole logic behind it, not just technicals. During my time at College i have done some trading courses learning some fundamentals like risk management etc. Is there some reliable resource to learn from? Furthermore should i focus only on one field (Equities/commodities/futures)

I really am lost as to how do i really learn and get to grow as an individual investor. Any real insight is welcome, just not people that thing because they paid some mentor are now finance gurus.

Thanks

spent years thinking my problem was strategy. kept tweaking entries, testing new setups, chasing a cleaner edge. turns out the single biggest improvement to my results came from a rule that has nothing to do with how i pick trades.

i stopped letting myself trade for a set time after a loss.

thats it. thats the rule. lose a trade, locked out for a bit, no exceptions.

heres why it mattered so much. i went back through my log and tagged every bad decision, moved stops, revenge entries, oversized positions, cutting winners early. i expected them to be spread out randomly. they werent. they clustered hard in the minutes right after a loss. like a huge chunk of my total damage came from a narrow window of time when i was tilted and trying to make it back.

the loss itself was never the problem. a loss is just part of the system, sized and expected. the problem was the second trade. the one i took angry, bigger, without a real setup, because losing lit something up in my monkey brain and i needed to fix it right now.

once i saw it as a time-clustering thing instead of a discipline thing, the fix got obvious. you dont need more willpower to not revenge trade. you need to not be at the controls for the 20 minutes where revenge trading happens. one is a personality change, the other is a timer. i know which one i can actually rely on.

the results werent subtle. cutting out that post-loss window removed most of my worst trades without touching a single thing about my actual strategy. the edge was always fine. i was the leak, and specifically i was the leak in a very predictable 20 minute window.

i built a little script to tag the trades by time-since-last-loss automatically, doing it by hand across a few hundred trades was painful. thats what made the clustering impossible to ignore, seeing it as a number instead of a vague suspicion.

if youre stuck and convinced you need a better system, id check this first. tag your worst trades and look at when they happened relative to your last loss. if they cluster like mine did, you dont have a strategy problem, you have a cooldown problem, and thats a much easier fix.

anyone else find their damage concentrated in specific moments rather than spread out? curious if the post-loss window is universal or just my particular flavour of tilt

Serious question: has anyone here actually succeeded in stopping themselves after a bad day?
Not asking about strategy. Asking about the 90 seconds after a loss.
I’ve been talking to maybe 25-30 traders over the last month, and the pattern is almost identical every time. Nobody says “my setup stopped working.” They say some version of:
• widened the SL because it was about to reverse
• doubled the size to recover the day
• took a trade I had no plan for, just to be in something
• told myself I’d stop after one more
And almost everyone knows they’re doing it while they’re doing it. That’s the part I find strange. It isn’t an information problem. Everyone can recite the rules.
So what I’m trying to understand is what actually works, if anything:
1. Has anything ever genuinely stopped you? Journaling, a fixed rule, a friend, walking away, a broker limit?
2. Or does everything eventually get overridden because you’re the one holding the override?
3. If something existed that you literally could not override once the session started — would that feel like help, or would it feel like a cage you’d never sign up for?
I’m asking because I’ve been building something in this space and I’m at the point where I need to know whether the premise is even right. I’d rather hear “nobody wants this” now than keep going on an assumption.
Not linking anything here, this isn’t a plug. Just want the honest answers.

I have been a binary options trader for the past 7 years with 4 years of actual consistency in making profits. I hope there are fellow traders in the room who trade binary options or use pocket option broker.