Leaving Money On the Table Is My #1 Trading Rule

Okay, okay, I admit it. I intentionally leave money on the table. But trust me, I don't do it because I'm cautious. I do it because I don't want to get wiped out when the price does the thing that everyone says it never will. Just like it did in October 2025, when we saw $19 billion in liquidations in one single day. And my account was only at 29% margin. So in this video, I'll explain why that decision keeps liquidation risk extremely low and lets me deploy capital with when it actually matters, and especially when others can't. So I'm just going to jump inside a tool here that we've built in Minotaur to help us engineer our reserves. So we can see here what I've.

Done is I've set up a hundred thousand dollars wallet size and I put.

In a base order and a safety order.

And what we can see is this frowning face up here. It's saying there's not enough capital required for the position size that I'm using. And you can see these two red ones there. We're not going to be executing at these lower ranges. We're right. We haven't got enough reserves to actually execute the strategy.

This is a really cool feature that.

We can see and we can start to control the amount of reserves we need.

So I'm going to drop that half.

Because that was quite high, and we'll see how the numbers change.

There we go. See, I've dropped it by half and.

We'Re still getting that, that frowny face. So it's telling me the required capital I need is a hundred thousand, five hundred. And I've actually got a hundred thousand wallet size.

So again, this is a really cool tool because it's telling me you need.

More reserves, you need more reserves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring that down to a nice, safe range, I think.

And again, all I'm changing is the.

Position size, not my wallet size. We change the position size and now, fantastic, the face has gone green and you can see we have enough reserves there. And again, if you want it to be more conservative, you could drop it down even further.

And of course, like we said in.

The video, we are going to sacrifice some upside, but we're going to be extremely prepared for the downside. As you can see now, the way I've said it, this is really, really nice. We've got a big gap between our liquidation price and the last entry that we're going to be making. And I Can completely see that as long as the price stays above this range here, this strategy is just going to execute and generate returns no matter what. So this is how we use tools like this to give us our decisions. We base everything on math and we engineer based on the architecture that we've already created.

Now there's a moment most traders reach if they stay in the game long enough. They've been disciplined, they follow their rules, they've sized conservatively, and it's worked. The trades close green drawdowns are manageable, and they're using a system that behaves exactly the way it's supposed to over time. Confidence, though, it turns into comfort. And that's when the thinking starts to shift. And I've seen it happen, not dramatically, but it's always, always really quietly. They start adjusting, but just a little. And then you start to see positions start to get a little larger, safety margins get a little tighter, and reserves inside the account get reduced because they just start to feel inefficient. And from the outside, nothing looks reckless. In fact, it just kind of looks like optimization. And this is kind of the same mistake that people make with insurance. You see, when nothing bad has happened for a long time, insurance kind of starts to feel unnecessary. It looks like a drag, a cost, something you're paying for without getting anything back. So what people do is they choose to reduce it and they remove the coverage and they optimize it away. And of course, everything looks fine right up until the day that something goes wrong. And in trading, reserves inside the account serve exactly the same purpose. They feel inefficient when markets are calm and trades are working. But that inefficiency is the trade off you make to avoid a loss that can permanently set you back. The mistake is thinking that the goal is to eliminate the cost. And this is where people get absolutely destroyed. Because the market doesn't punish ignorance nearly as hard as it punishes comfort. I've seen this pattern happen over and over again, even with clients in my inner circle. People don't blow up because they are wrong just once. They blow up because they relax the rules after being right too long. And the danger isn't the first trade, it's the tenth one that worked. It's the streak that convinces someone that this time is different. Stops don't matter, Liquidity disappears. And because reserves were already consumed chasing those extra returns, there's no room for maneuver, there's no ability to hedge, which is so important. And of course, there's no ability to even stay in the trade and accounts that took years to build get erased in a single move. And that's even worse than the loss itself, because once you're forced out because the drawdown is too deep or the account is too far gone, compounding stops. You don't get to deploy capital when prices are actually attractive. And compounding at those levels is the absolute magic of trading. And of course, you're not going to get to participate in the recovery, and that's the real cost. So, not missing upside, but losing the ability to. To operate at all. And that's why I personally leave money on the table on purpose. Not because I don't see the upside, not because I'm afraid of returns, but because reserves inside the account, they're not wasted capital. They're actually structural insurance. And keeping reserves means liquidation levels stay extremely low. You retain the ability to hedge when volatility expands, and you can add extra exposure at significantly cheaper prices instead of being forced out. And you are never trading from a position of desperation, which is so important. So pushing for the last bit of profit almost always requires eating into those reserves. And once they're gone, the entire structure becomes so fragile. So instead of optimizing for maximum return, I optimize for survivability. And that means that risk is capped intentionally. Reserves are kept available at all times, and exits are respected, even if the price keeps running. And yes, that means I sometimes miss moves, and that's fine, because what I never miss is the ability to stay deployed and to keep compounding the magic of compounding. And when the market finally offers a symmetric opportunity, the counterintuitive truth is this being safer at the account level often produces more money over the long run. And not because those returns are higher in any single trade, but because losses never cascade, liquidations never force you out, and the curve is never reset. That's the strategy. Stay operational. Keep reserves inside the account. Let time, not leverage, do the heavy lifting. Leaving money on the table. It isn't a weakness. It's how you make sure you're still here for the next opportunity, and, of course, the one after that. So if you want to learn more about how I handle big trades under pressure, go and watch the video that I made about holding a $1.2 million position.