Trading Rule #21 – Is Trading Like Losing Weight?

I read a comment on X yesterday about a trader basically saying “I was terrible yesterday but great today”.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

It’s frustrating, but progress in trading is not linear. When you lose weight, unless you are a complete psychopath and eat the exact same thing every day, your weight will trend down but some days you will be heavier than the previous day – partly poop storage and partly water retention.

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And even before you start your diet, there’s a million courses telling you “life hacks” to lose weight for $97, including 4 bonus items. Pretty much all of these life hacks are not “eat less and exercise more”. It’s all shortcuts because people want shortcuts. They just don’t want to put the work in.

And isn’t trading exactly the same? The reality in trading is you need to “eat fewer setups and journal more”.

Try a new fad each week and you will fail. Failing to review your trades will stall your improvement.

But if you do get to profit, you need to hold on to it. Before you get to consistency, you probably think that’s the end point. That once you get there, you’ll sit on a throne in Castle Profit and rule the markets forever.

Then volatility changes and you go from feeling like a trading genius to Forrest Gump.

You can’t just lose weight and go back to your old eating habits, you have to keep eating healthier food or it just goes back on.

In trading, you can’t rely on a handful of setups to work forever. The market is a moving target. You get yourself to profit in one set of conditions and need to evolve as those conditions change. Some setups will disappear and some will require more or less risk over time.

To get to profit, you probably had to adapt to several different market types along the way. Right now, with Iran and the US fighting over Hormuz, anyone who has been trading for six months or more has already seen very different conditions.

This is a simple rule with a simple message – don’t take your foot off the gas when you become profitable.

There is no “coasting” in this game, not if you want to fit into your profitable trousers for a few years.

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