Why do you lose more the more you watch the market? Because you treat the candlestick chart as an electrocardiogram hanging over your heart, viewing your position as a life-or-death necessity, and the emotional fluctuations between rises and falls have long driven rationality out of the window.
After being in the circle for a long time, you'll notice the outcomes of three types of people. This is not metaphysics; it's an iron law hidden in trading: those who go all-in panic and close the software to escape when it drops, and get jittery when it rises just a little; those who are flat miss out on opportunities and regret not watching the market for three days, are late to realize the bull market, and are gleeful in a bear market; only those who hold onto “half position + stop-loss” can maintain their mindset, and their account curve can steadily rise.
True trading wisdom is treating trading as a game with a clear mindset—don’t flaunt when you win, don’t get irritable when you lose, don’t shift blame when you blow up, don’t inflate your ego when you profit, and always focus on “how to play the next round”, never getting stuck in “how to recover from the last round”. To incorporate this mindset into your trading system, it actually boils down to three steps.
Step one, never go all-in. If you put all your capital in, you turn from a player into a gambler, left only with prayers, but the market never yields to “prayers”; it will only make your blood pressure surge in the ups and downs. Step two, never stay flat. Without a position, your sensitivity to the market will instantly drop to zero. It may seem like you’ve avoided a bear market, but in reality, you are disconnected from the market, and both your understanding and capital will shrink. Step three, adjust your position to the “slight pressure” zone. I have a simple method: lie in bed at eleven o'clock at night, if you can suddenly wake up due to breaking news, your position is just right—feeling too sleepy means too little money, and not being able to sleep means too heavy a position. I maintain a position of 40%-60% for years; when it drops 10%, I don’t smash the keyboard; when it rises 20%, I’m happy but don’t quit my job, not scared by short-term fluctuations.
Don’t misunderstand that a game mindset means being laid-back; it is actually the sharpest offense. It forces you to focus on “how to win the next round”, rather than getting trapped in the emotions of “how to break even from the last round”—the former produces replicable strategies, while the latter only leads to emotional explosions.
Completely gamify trading: fixed positions for “leveling up”, stop-loss as “revival coins”, and reviewing trades as “leveling guides”. When you take it to the extreme, you will find that the market is still the same market, the stocks you hold are still those stocks, but you have transformed from the easily harvested “leeks” into a stable profit-making “gold farming studio”.
