Your Response To Loss Matters More Than The Loss Itself

So I just lost like $20,000 in the span of two minutes. And in this video, I'm just going to share a really raw reflection and maybe share a couple of lessons on how you can also deal with a similar situation when you do face it. Because the truth is, when it comes to trading, as long as you continue to trade, there are going to be times when you are waiting for the perfect setup for the whole week and then you see it and then you get stopped out by just a tiny bit and then Price moves completely the other way. Or there are moments when you have the perfect setup, you take it, but it doesn't pan out. And you know, it's frustrating, it's annoying, it's incredibly vexing as long as you continue to trade like this is going to happen time and time again. But I think before I get into like the lessons, it's important to first give you a bit more context as to the exact trade that I was looking at. So, so essentially you got a sweep of a higher time frame level over there and once that sweep happened, you got an M5 changes to delivery. And initially I was actually going short and I lost that trade. So that was perfectly fine. But I was able to just react in time and understand that hey, it's about to be news like 9:40am and price is definitely showing like bullish indication. And so I flipped my bias and I was right. But the problem is initially I set my entry at this order block right here because this entire thing is now an order block. And instead of setting my stop loss below this low as I would usually do, I just got a bit greedy and decided to set my stop below this 1 minute low instead. Now, I wasn't trading on the 1 minute low, but I was just kind of setting my stop loss arbitrarily over there. You can see like I just got stopped out by a couple of ticks before Price just absolutely shot the other way. And the thing that makes it worse is not only the fact that I got stopped out like by a tiny bit, but that in the five minutes or like three minutes leading up to the news event, I actually just stepped away from the charts for a bit, having full confidence that, hey, you know, I like, I'm in. And yeah, when I came back to the charts, this candle happened. This is a single one minute candle. And I realized like, instead of being like $5,000 in profit, I was stopped out and there was nothing on my screen. Same thing happened on Ethereum as well. I entered on this five minute fertility Gap right there. And then I kind of just placed my stop loss arbitrarily as well, and that got stopped out as well. I literally just put it at the middle of the fair bit gap, and then Price went just a tiny bit below the middle of the fair bit gap. And then I got stopped out. And instead of walking back to another $5,000 in profit on Ethereum, I walked back with nothing. And this is incredibly frustrating because the truth is, I had been waiting for this setup for the entire week. Like, since Monday. I was already predicting, like, the biggest day is going to be on Friday. And as long as that higher time frame level was taken out before Friday, things were going to go good. Like, it's basically going to pump. And that's exactly what we got. And I had been watching that for, like. Like a hulk for the whole time. And to be stopped out by a few ticks two minutes before the news actually dropped is just so incredibly heartbreaking because again, I spent all week waiting for this. But I think this is where. This is where the lesson comes in. Because the win that I got today, I'm going to call it a win because, like, things could have been much worse. Is that instead of just throwing the system out of the window and, like, all right, you know, I can actually make this back. I had full confidence that Price was actually going to continue going higher, which it did. Like, price is still going higher right now. I didn't do anything. Like, I felt really bad. I felt horrible, actually. Like, I haven't felt this bad in a while because, again, like, everything was lining up. This is. This is this type of setup that, you know, shows up, like, once every two weeks, maybe once a month, and I fumbled it like an idiot. And of course, it's very frustrating. Like, even until now, like, I still feel bad, but it's also why it's the perfect time, why I'm making this video, like, right after. And I think the lesson here is that regardless of how you may be feeling, you don't want to act on your emotions unless your system kind of dictates it. Unless you have specific conditions from your system that actually says, hey, all your conditions are met. This is where you jump in. You don't go in now. Not going to lie. I was waiting for that. I was looking for that. Like, even on bitcoin, like, this was kind of like a February gap that I was looking to get filled. And Price came all the way, just a tiny bit here. Like, I even set a limit order here and placed my stop Loss underneath the F gap just to play it safe this time and not do like, just set my stop loss, like really stupidly. But yeah, price didn't get filled and it just started shooting up. And again on this order block right here, once price actually broke through, I set a limit and Price never just like, Price just straight up did not retrace. All of this was not emotional decision making. This is rooted in my system. Like, I'm still trading my system even when I'm feeling absolutely terrible. The thing you need to realize about the markets and the thing that I had to learn the hard way about the markets is that the financial markets, like, regardless if it's crypto or forex, whatever, as long as it's the market, this thing is like, it heavily punishes emotional decision making, especially when those emotions are coming from a negative place. The thing is, oftentimes, in fact, 99% of the time, people don't blow up their accounts because of the first loss. It's almost never the first loss. Like, you don't lose your account because of your first loss. Because unless you just straight up throw risk management out the window and you just risk your entire account, which I think most of you watching this are not, are not doing stuff on that level. It's not the first loss that really gets you. It's what you do after that first loss. Do you start chasing? Do you start trying to make it back? Do you start revenge trading? Fun fact, actually, I think, don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure one of the top reasons that people blow up their accounts or like just lose everything is revenge trading. It's that feeling of once you lose that first trade and you get incredibly frustrated, but then you just throw your system out the window and you just start chasing. And one loss turns into two losses, that second loss pisses you off even more and you just start like the negative doom spiral just goes out of control. And before you know it, what starts as kind of like a very manageable loss, right, Turns into a situation that you cannot recover. And the thing is, like, the markets really trains you to not act on your emotions, even though your entire body and your entire being screaming at you like, hey, you need, you need to get it back on. Like, you just lost $10,000. And the thing is, if you want a good, like, if you want to trade good, and if you want to do this as a career, and if you want to have a sustainable trading career and you want to be consistently profitable over time, you're really Going to have to learn to just be at peace with the negative emotions. Because the truth is, like, this is going to happen. This has happened so many times throughout my entire, like five year, six year career that I've been trading. It is still happening now and it will continue to happen as we, as we go forward. You cannot avoid these situations where, you know, you plan for everything and you're waiting a long time and it just doesn't happen because, like, the thing is, this is going to happen. And if there's one thing that you can be sure of is that the market will not care that you feel absolutely terrible. It doesn't care that you've waited for one week or one month for the setup. It doesn't care. It's just gonna do its own thing. And whatever you're feeling and whatever you feel like doing is all a product of your own mind, right? It's nothing to do with the markets. It's just you. And like, this is the really tough part about trading because good trading oftentimes goes against all of our instincts. Like when somebody pisses you off, like if, if you're driving and somebody pisses you off, you're probably going to flip them off, right? Because in that very moment you felt something really negative. And the way that you're going to resolve that negativity is to maybe let it out or to just resolve it immediately. But the thing about, like, trading is that you can't do that. Whenever you feel anything, like just super negative, the worst thing you can do is try to take it out on the markets and to like, just start chasing or like just get angry at the markets or whatever. But you can't take it out on the markets. You can't really take it out on yourself as well. Like, you know, that emotion's already dead. So are you going to take it out on yourself? And this is not the only example. Like, even if you look at the fact that, okay, like, bitcoin's been going straight up, Ethereum's going, going straight up. Common, like, societal conditioning is that, oh yeah, if something goes up too much and it's, you know, very expensive in price, we probably don't buy it because it's not value for money. But that's not how the markets work. Something that's going up, as long as the market structure and the order flow and everything is showing that it's going to continue going up, we simply buy higher and sell higher. It's not like, oh, bitcoin's too expensive right now. Let Me start shorting and then you're going to start shorting right into an uptrend, right? You're basically counter trend trading and you're going to lose money. So again, it's just another example that good trading really goes against all of our instincts as a human, especially as human, like living in society. And so the way that I deal with these like negative emotions and it's kind of like what I'm doing now is I'm sharing about it, right? I'm journaling it. I am just trying to, you know, be at peace with the negative emotions. And don't get me wrong, I still feel absolutely terrible right now. The fact that I'm seeing like bitcoin go from 112,000 and now at 117,000 within the last hour and a half. This pisses me off because I saw this coming, I knew this was coming. And because of a small mistake, it was the difference between a $2,000 loss and like 20k profits. Of course it's frustrating and if there's one thing that I know is not going to help is by revenge trading and taking random trades right now and losing even more money. Because I've been there, I've done that more than, more than a few times actually. And like it's, it's just really taught me the hard way. Here's kind of like a practical solution to whenever you do feel like this, like I can just say, oh yeah, just be at peace. But like what, what I really do, like on a practical scale is I do something else. I don't want to call it like distracting myself, but it's kind of like directing the negative energy and just putting it into somewhere else. Me making this video right now is a way that I'm directing that energy elsewhere. And right now I'm doing kind of like a video reflection. Now usually I would just journal it down and you know, I would just speak to myself on pen and paper. But the fact that I have this YouTube channel and I have this platform allows me the opportunity to do kind of like a video reflection. Now some other things that I do is I just start just working on, you know, aoc, right? It's why I have like a lot of the times people say, oh, if you're, if you're already profitable trading, why you, why are you doing all this other stuff? Or like if you want to be very profitable in trading or like if you want to go all in on trading, you should quit your job. I heavily disagree with that because trading is one of Those things that nothing happens for the longest period of time when you're waiting for that setup, right? It's not like every day there's something happening and you can just jump right in and take like 20 trades a day. The reality is most of the moves are concentrated in like a couple of key hours during the day, right? Most of the time that happens in New York, maybe London. But even then it's like for 20 hours of the day at least, there's really not much happening. Or even if there is something happening, chances are it's not going to line up with your system. And so the reality of trading is that you're sitting here for most of the day just waiting for something to happen. And if you have nothing else to do other than trading, you're going to be looking at that chart and the chart's going to speak to you. You're going to start seeing things that are not actually there just because you're bored and you want to, you know, deal with that Borden somehow. And so you're going to just trades just to, you know, get a little quick dopamine hit in. But you and I, like, we both know that isn't a recipe for, know, just profitable training. And so it's actually really helpful to have a job, to have something else that you can dedicate your energy into. Because when you, like, forget the boredom part of things, when you run into situations like this, you actually have else, like somewhere else where you can direct that energy into. And that's so important. And so on a practical scale, like one, try to reflect on your emotions. Even better if you can write it down because at least you're, you know, kind of like dealing with the emotions and addressing it instead of just trying to, like, distract yourself by playing games or whatever or watching YouTube videos I've done that doesn't really quite work. Still go to bed feeling pretty terrible. And alternatively, like, even better if you can just kind of talk it out with, you know, a loved one, a partner, a friend or whatever, chances are there's nobody that's really going to understand what you're doing. Which is why, like, it's so good to have a community of, well, at least to have some trader friends that you can kind of like speak to. Because moments like this where you just realize how lonely you are in this training space. Because truth is, nobody really understands what we do. At least 99.9% of people really don't. And this is why I'm also like, yeah, like, so happy to have built a community inside Bootcamp where I'm able to just share. And not just me, like, all the members just have the safe space to be able to share and actually have people realize exactly what they're going through and just be able to reassure them that it's. This is normal and it's a part of the game and it's okay. Just relax, try to resolve the emotions, and then come back the next day stronger. But, yeah, if there's one thing that I want you guys to take away from this video, just one thing, is that it's never the first loss that is the issue. It is never the first loss that causes all of the problems. It's what you do after the first loss that really counts. These days are going to come. These moments are going to continue coming as long as you train. And if you don't learn how to deal with these moments, then there will come a time or there will come multiple moments where you're just going to blow up your account or multiple times. But, yeah, cheers.