How Psychology Made Me Close a Good Trade to Take a Bad One

Storytime

This week, I had my first bad week since I started my trading journal on the Discord server. I made a lot of mistakes — mainly due to psychology. Every time you take the time to look back and reflect on your trading, you realize that everything is in your head. And honestly, I find that both funny and fascinating at the same time. Anyway, I wanted to share how, on November 4th, I completely self-destroyed myself. It’ll show you exactly the kind of shit you want to avoid.

So, I called a trade at 7:55 AM, saying I wanted to sell gold. The reason was that around 5 AM, I was already seeing the dollar index (DXY) appreciating a lot that day, and gold couldn’t break the top of the range. There was also a ton of liquidity sitting at the trendline touches, and price clearly wasn’t interested in rebounding from it again — which made me think XAU would go lower toward 4020, the Fibonacci support of the range.

For now, everything seems reasonable. But the truth is that even if my analysis wasn’t bad that day, I wasn’t in the right conditions to take a trade, stay calm, and stay focused. At 7:55 AM, I was literally on the subway going to school to learn math. So yeah, I took trades on multiple accounts on my phone, with terrible Wi-Fi. Of course, because trading is a mirror of who you really are and your mood at that exact moment, it showed in my trade management.

I was impatient, agitated, and impulsive. I made things even harder for myself because my brain was rushing — trying to get to school, prepare, follow a math class, and at the same time watch my charts on my phone. I didn’t have my laptop or my iPad while I was in the subway or walking to class…

Here’s what happened next: I got fooled by the noise of the lower timeframes. When price came back toward my entry area, I decided to stupidly close my trades at break-even, completely changed my bias in like one minute, and — obviously — it didn’t work. I took a stupid loss. I even thought about entering a buy again, but honestly, I think God protected me that day. I REPEAT: all of that happened on my phone while walking to school. How crazy is that?

This little story shows the importance of being in the right mindset and environment when you trade. I love how ironic it is — my trade management and mistakes were just a perfect reflection of who I was in that moment.

The best thing you can do is take 100% accountability. Reflect on what happened and find solutions. There were so many options: maybe instead of entering on multiple accounts, I could’ve just taken one position. Maybe I could’ve risked less than usual. Or the best option — I could’ve just said, fuck it, I’m not entering. Because deep down, I knew I wouldn’t trade well in those conditions. And anyway, the market will always be here. There will always be opportunities to make money.

This article was a way for me to reflect. I also shared these thoughts on my server once I had time to rest and process my mistakes.

Alright, that’s it. As you can see, we can’t always be perfect traders — and that’s okay. Sharing a moment where I made bad decisions just makes me better.

Have a great trading week.