Hey trader,
I admit it. I screwed up.
I made a mistake.
This past week, I had a couple of trading sessions where I took trades or adjusted trades that shouldn’t have been touched. Others would have been big winners if I’d just stuck to the rules and process I’ve followed for years.
Now, you might be a little perturbed if you were following the trades with me. You might even think, “How can someone who’s been trading for 26 years, using this system for 15 of them, make such a simple, absurd mistake?”
Well, I have an example that should resonate with you: have you ever bitten your tongue while eating?
Biting your tongue is a perfect example of how experience doesn’t make you immune to painful mistakes. Some of us have been chewing every day, thousands of times, for decades.
Even after millions of repetitions, we still somehow end up biting our tongue or cheek. It hurts a lot.
Tears sting your eyes. You mutter something under your breath and grab your mouth like that’ll calm the pulsing pain.
So what do you do next?
Do you swear off eating and say, “I’m not good at this, I need to quit”? Do you decide to have someone else chew for you?
Do you assume your teeth are out to get you? Do you revenge-chew, going twice as fast and twice as hard?
Of course not. All of that would be ridiculous.
What do we actually do after biting our tongue? We pause and wait for the pain to subside.
We pick the fork back up and keep eating. Maybe we’re a little more careful.
Maybe we slow down and get more thoughtful about how we chew. We keep eating anyway, because we have to.
We must keep chewing if we want to survive and grow, no matter what pain we just went through.
This is trading.
We will make mistakes, sometimes dumb ones, the trading equivalent of biting our tongue.
No matter how much experience we have with our systems or in the markets, we will occasionally step outside that disciplined process and bite down hard. It will hurt.
The losses hurt. The missed profits hurt.
The self-blame hurts most of all, because you know it was entirely your own doing.
I hope this doesn’t get so far into your head that you actually bite your tongue at your next meal.
I do hope it sticks with you the next time you make a mistake in trading. Recognize the mistake, review your rules, and get back to trading your system.
Maybe a little more thoughtfully. You’re still trading, though.
That’s how we grow, both our understanding and our accounts.
Twenty-six years in, I still bite my tongue sometimes. I still eat the next meal, because the fork doesn’t stay down for long.
That’s exactly what we work through inside the 10% Club. We cover the system and the rules, plus what to do the moment you break them.
Every session gets reviewed together, win or lose. When you bite your tongue, you’re not sitting there alone wondering if you should quit eating.
You pick the fork back up with people who’ve bitten theirs too.
If you’re ready to trade with that kind of accountability, come pull up a seat at the table.
If your trading tongue hurts right now, pick the fork back up. It’s time to get back to eating.
Blake Young
Senior Market Strategist, TheoTRADE
