The deepest pain in trading is never the loss of money, but knowing where the problem lies yet being unable to control oneself.

Here are several pains experienced during the trading process; how many have you encountered?

1. Missing out

When the market starts and you miss it, the physiological pain is real. Harvard neuroscience experiments have shown that the brain areas activated by missing out are the same as those activated by physical injury. Even more deadly is that the pain of missing out triggers revenge trading.

2. Consecutive stop losses

During consecutive stop losses, the collapse of self-esteem far exceeds the shrinkage of the account.

Beginners often fall into a vicious cycle after repeated stop losses: the more they stop losses, the more they doubt the system → reduce the stop loss range → get penetrated by random fluctuations → completely give up on stop losses → blow up the account and exit.

The root of this pain lies in equating stop losses with failure, rather than seeing them as an inevitable cost of a probability game.

3. Dilemma of closing positions

Regretting to close positions too early for less profit, and hating to give back when closing later, is essentially the greed of wanting to eat all the fish flesh. It is rumored in the industry that a certain futures tycoon made a floating profit of 200 million in the nickel bull market without taking profits, ultimately losing 50 million when exiting, and was hospitalized for depression for three months.

4. Inconsistency between knowledge and action

Qingze once said: 'If one day I can't succeed in trading, it's not because I don't know how to make money, but because I didn't do it.'

When you clearly know you should stop losses but your fingers are stiff, and when you should hold positions but panic and close them instead, the sense of disconnection between consciousness and body is a hundred times more painful than the loss itself. This is the most common 'occupational cancer' among advanced traders and the ultimate filter that eliminates 95% of practitioners.

Consistent execution is the final hurdle for traders; if you can't get over it, you won't make money in the end.

5. Loneliness

Trading is a war with oneself; the path of trading is not easy. When you have not succeeded, facing doubts from all your friends and family, even your partner wavers, that icy loneliness can destroy the strongest will.

6. Capital

The cruelest truth for ordinary traders: when you need to withdraw living expenses from your account, you have already lost at the starting line. Forced to close positions at the wrong time due to mortgage/child-rearing pressures, leading to missing many market opportunities.

There are also some veterans who, when they have the ability to make stable profits, find that the capital they can use has long been lost.

Common ways traders fail include: not stopping losses, trading with heavy positions, frequent trading, emotional trading, increasing positions against the trend, listening to news, listening to masters...

Increasing positions dies from pullbacks, not increasing dies from wear, trends die from fluctuations, and fluctuations begin to die from one-sided movements.

Why is trading so difficult? Because you can only do your best and leave the rest to fate.

Doing your best means you must adhere to the correct trading philosophy, such as: trading lightly in the direction of the trend, diversifying across multiple varieties, cutting losses, and letting profits run.

The saying of fate means that even if your trading system is correct, you still cannot make a profit as long as the market conditions do not come. When will the market come? How big will it be when it arrives? These cannot be known in advance.

Therefore, in trading, ultimately, it is about insisting on consistent execution, a trading system with a positive expected return, and then patiently waiting. The true strong are those who, after recognizing the truth of trading, still love trading.

Those trading masters who ultimately traverse the darkness do not lack pain, but instead forge their pain into the armor of cognition. As Soros implied in 'Financial Alchemy': the market rewards not the smartest, but those who can dance with pain, the 'sober patients.'