In the world of trading, if you want to reap results, you must grit your teeth and endure the torturous 'psychological breakdown period'. Every veteran who has struggled in the trading field for years has experienced unspeakable painful losses, and I am no exception.
In my second year of trading, it happened to coincide with a downturn after the Bitcoin (using 'Bitcoin' here to replace the original text '大饼' for a more formal expression) craze subsided. During that period, it seemed like I was favored by Lady Luck; I successfully shorted the market for several consecutive weeks. Whether shorting during pullbacks or after breaking support, every operation was incredibly precise; my account balance skyrocketed seven to eight times, with profits reaching hundreds of thousands. At that time, I was floating, even starting to dream of 'doubling my money in two weeks', feeling that financial freedom was just within reach, I just needed to catch one more wave of the market.
So, my courage grew bigger, and my positions became heavier. However, the market quietly reversed, but my mindset was still stuck in a bearish market, stubbornly mistaking the obvious reversal for a pullback. In the end, after a heavy operation, my mentality collapsed completely because the floating loss on my account was astonishingly large.
In order to quickly break even, I invested all my funds at what I believed to be a critical resistance level, trying to bet on a pullback to recover my losses. But the market showed no signs of stopping and continued to rise. Just a few minutes later, my account was forcefully liquidated.
At that moment, my mind went blank, as if fireworks were exploding in my ears, and I instantly collapsed. On one hand, there was the huge financial loss; hundreds of thousands just went down the drain, and that heart-wrenching feeling is hard to express. On the other hand, my confidence and hope were completely shattered. I thought I had mastered the secrets of trading and could stabilize profits through it, but reality dealt me a heavy blow, making me realize that my trading strategy was just a joke.
In the first few years of trading, I experienced countless psychological breakdowns like this. Sometimes it was after significant profits, only to quickly lose, that despair of falling from the clouds to the ground made me collapse; sometimes I correctly predicted the market but didn’t dare to place an order, only to watch the opportunity slip away, and the disappointment made me collapse; sometimes I missed the market but blindly chased the highs and lows, resulting in being trapped, and the regret made me collapse; sometimes long-term losses made me start to doubt life and my abilities, this self-doubt made me collapse; there were also times when I traded against the trend, stubbornly refusing to believe the market would reverse, continuously adding positions, ultimately leading to a liquidation, and this despair made me collapse.
People often say that trading is a condensed version of life. In the world of trading, you have to endure blows again and again to gradually grow and become mature and stable.
In fact, getting through the psychological breakdown period is not difficult; the key is to correct your perception. You need to understand that the most important thing in trading is not to be right every time, but to survive in this market first.
You can occasionally be right a few times, but you cannot be right all the time. Because the market trends are chaotic, and the market is ruthless; losses are unavoidable. Therefore, you need to lower your expectations, don’t always think that you can double your money with just a few trades, and don’t always think that catching one wave of trend will turn your situation around. It’s better to maintain stability, even if you earn a little less, than to suffer a big loss and exit.
At the same time, don’t let negative emotions accumulate. Keep your trading frequency from being too high, and don’t be too tight with your monitoring pace. After making a mistake, give yourself some emotional buffer time to cool down. When building a trading system, don’t blindly pursue extreme profit-loss ratios; instead, pay more attention to the success rate and try to reduce the occurrence of consecutive mistakes, so that your mindset won’t be so anxious.
Ultimately, mentality is the shackle you impose on yourself. The tighter you hold on, the more you want, the more suffocated you will feel. Moreover, in this psychological battle, no one can endure it for you. You can only rely on yourself to truly understand the cruelty of the market, recognize your own insignificance, and lower your desires to coexist harmoniously with the market.
Due to space limitations, please look forward to future updates on how to get through the lonely period and the period of being misunderstood, as well as subsequent summaries.
If you currently feel helpless, confused in trading, follow me to no longer lose your way!
If you can clearly see the market, you will have the confidence to operate. Steady gains are much more practical than fantasizing about getting rich quickly.
