In the primal jungle, the persistence of tightly holding flint when the spark extinguished, the solitary courage of migrating towards unknown valleys during the Ice Age—'hope' was once the survival key etched into human DNA, allowing us to endure the winds and snow in the barbaric era of slash-and-burn agriculture. However, when this genetic legacy enters the financial market, it becomes the sharpest double-edged sword: the obsession that could ignite a campfire in ancient times is now burning traders' accounts in another form.
The Tamed Hope: From Survival Weapon to Loss Trap
When primitive people chased deer with stone spears, 'hope' was the adrenaline that supported them through thorns; yet when traders murmur 'just wait for a rebound' while staring at candlestick charts, this instinct is weaving a trap for the frog in warm water. The market never shifts its trajectory due to the profit or loss of a position—while you lose sleep over unrealized losses in front of the screen, the quote machine at the New York Commodity Exchange still ticks in milliseconds, and the delivery slips at the London Metal Exchange never care who is praying for a turnaround. Some held onto long positions the night before negative oil prices, fantasizing that 'history won't repeat itself'; others increased their positions during waterfall markets in the crypto world, firmly believing that 'faith will eventually recover', ultimately being proven wrong by the market in the most brutal way: when you use hope as leverage, leverage will turn into a noose.
The cognitive trap of beginners: using emotions to fight against the laws of probability.
The essence of market operations is never logical deduction, but the probabilistic presentation of multi-party games. Too many newcomers enter the market with a 'script mentality': presupposing that 'breaking resistance must rise', imagining that 'the main force will pull the market to break even', and even self-soothing during losses with 'this wave of correction is just a washout'. The fatal flaw in this thinking is equating trading with 'black or white' right and wrong, while neglecting that the market is a chaotic system born from the collision of millions of traders' expectations. Just as a cheetah does not pray for its prey to 'run slower', real traders never expect the market to 'cooperate'—they calculate their stop-loss levels before opening positions, and are more decisive than algorithms when trends reverse, because they understand: the survival law of the financial market has never been 'perseverance leads to victory', but rather 'only by living can one engage in competition'.
The awakening from the bloodbath of liquidation: giving up hope is a form of practice.
I have seen accounts shrink from six figures to four figures in the middle of the night and have tasted the trembling of fingers when holding positions until forced liquidation. Those days marked with red crosses in trading logs made me realize: when you mutter 'if it rises another 10 points, I'll close the position' while staring at the candlestick chart, the primal impulse in your genes is hijacking your rationality. True experts have deconstructed 'hope' into quantifiable rules: using Fibonacci retracement lines to set exit points, using ATR indicators to set stop-loss limits, and using position management to hedge against black swans. They observe the market like cold-blooded hunters—striking decisively when prey appears and retreating immediately when the wind shifts, never replacing trading plans with 'maybe it will rise'.
The cruel truth of the trading arena is that the survival instinct bestowed by evolution is precisely the elimination mechanism of the financial market. While you are still entangled in 'this judgment should be correct this time', mature traders have already written their exit strategy in their stop-loss orders; while you place your account's profit and loss on 'the market will give opportunities', they are calculating the probability of success for the next entry using probability thinking. This is not a game without temperature, but a practice of using discipline to counteract nature—after all, in the leverage meat grinder, those who survive are never the most stubborn gamblers, but the first ones to shed the 'illusion of hope'.#常见交易错误