Mental Shift for 2025

If you've been struggling to be consistent with trading, I'm going to lay down a mental framework which has helped me reach the next level psychologically speaking. Firstly, take trading off a pedestal. It's just gambling, and it's totally fine to think of it as such. Honestly, it took immense pressure off for me when I treated it fully like gambling. I will never know what will happen next, and every move is just a total gamble - lets just say its 50-50. It takes the pressure off because you know every action you take has an equal chance of going in your favour or against. Secondly, ask yourself why you want to be right all the time? Probably because back to point 1, you put trading on a pedestal for some reason. It's just gambling, so take the pressure off of this need to be right and win. Thirdly, cover your ass. Treat trading like gambling, but don't be stupid with it. Just because its gambling doesn't mean you have to be a degenerate and risk stupidly. Just risk what you can afford to lose - plain and simple. It goes up or down, and if it doesn't go your way, lose small. As long as you lose small, you live to trade another day. Take a $ value you are ok parting with forever, divide it by 20, risk that per trade. This assumes you will lose 20 trades back to back. Fourthly, don't fight the trend, ever. Why are you trying to predict the market? What's the point? Are you trying to "win" this game? Just look at any chart and I'm sure you see the ebbs and flows. The waves are so clear to see in hindsight - just assume it will continue and ride them till they fail. And lastly, don't underestimate the power of your intuition but only if you have put in enough chart time. You have got to know yourself deeply to know the difference between intuitive pattern recognition and just emotions like fear and greed. The whole reason for having a trading plan is to give yourself some structure to fall back on, but the plan comes from your intuition, and its a living, breathing document. As you study and trade markets daily, you get these "feelings". Assume the feelings are wrong, but act on them always, with stop losses in place. Eventually that intuition gets trained slowly. You take those feelings and boil them down to objective rules. It becomes your own unique edge.