Surviving Myself: What I Learnt in 15+ Years of Trading
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In June this year, one Friday jobs report took most of my year away in two sessions.
I was up about 7.5% for the year, mostly in semiconductor and memory names. The number came in hot, the whole group gapped down, and by the next session I was back to roughly flat. That night I wrote one line in my journal: discipline lapse, not strategy failure. I had a rule that said trim the concentration before a big data release, I had written that rule myself, and I still didn’t fire it.
I have been around markets for 15+ years now, since I walked into my first finance job on my 21st birthday in 2007. And if you asked me what those years taught me, almost none of it is about predicting the market. Most of it is about managing the person pressing the buttons, which in my case is me.
Why do smart people still fail at this?
Someone on Reddit asked a question recently that I hear in some form almost every month:
“Why do more than 90% people fail despite spending considerable time in the market, upgrading their knowledge, taking legit courses…”
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is a bit uncomfortable. Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. By the time most people ask this, they already know what a stop loss is, what position sizing is, and why you should not average down into a falling stock. What they struggle with is doing it at 9.45pm when the chart is moving against them and every part of their brain is shouting.
So you might be thinking, surely after 15+ years that part gets easy? Well, June 2026 says no. It gets easier, and it never gets automatic. That is the concession I would rather make up front, because everything below is something I still have to work at.
How often am I actually wrong?
About half the time, which still surprises people who assume a professional is right most days.
I keep a public log of every trade since April 2024, dated, losses left in. Of the 485 trades closed so far, about half were winners. That sounds terrible until you look at the second number. The average winner was about 3 times the size of the average loser.
Here is what that does over 10 trades, in R (one R is the amount I risk on a trade):
5 losers × −1R = −5R
5 winners × +3R = +15R
Net: +10R
Being wrong half the time still compounds, as long as the losers stay small. The beginner instinct runs the other way. People chase a high win rate, take profits early to “lock it in”, and let losers run because closing them feels like admitting a mistake. I wrote up the maths of why a 70% win rate can still lose money in Win Rate vs Risk Reward, and the formula behind the table above is in Trading Expectancy Formula.
The lesson for me was emotional before it was mathematical. Once I accepted that half my trades would lose, a single loss stopped feeling like a verdict on me. It became the cost of doing business, the same way a casino expects to pay out on some hands.
If I knew the rule, why didn’t I follow it?
Back to June. The part of that story I am least proud of happened about ten days later.
After the giveback, I sat down, wrote my lesson, and felt good about it. Then, going into a Fed meeting, I levered straight back up into the same concentration, from roughly 0.43 times my account to about 1.06 times. That is about 2.5 times the exposure, in the exact names that had just hurt me. That one stung.
The relapse taught me far more than the loss did. I had written the rule down twice by then, and it still did not fire, because a rule that lives as a sentence in a document competes with fear, greed and the very human wish to win it back quickly. Writing it down a third time was not going to change anything.
So what actually fixed it?
A protein shake, oddly enough.
The night before one of those mornings I had staged a shake in the fridge, and I drank it on autopilot without a single thought. The same morning, the trim rule in my trading plan sat there and did nothing. The difference was not willpower. The shake was a physical object in front of me, and the rule was just prose.
So now my rules are objects wherever I can make them objects. A standing scale-out order sits on the position, so the trim happens whether I feel brave or not. A calendar block before a big data release says, in capital letters, to cut exposure. The decision gets made once while I am calm, so the moment of fear only has to leave it alone.
If you have a trading plan that you keep “meaning” to follow, this is the part I would look at first. The 7 key ingredients of a trading plan matter, but a plan that cannot execute itself on your worst day is only half built.
What does the job really look like day to day?
Mostly waiting.
The only years I was glued to a screen were the early ones, when I traded professionally for a few years for a fund. Since then, the job has looked more like a sniper than a machine gun. In a typical week I might check 47 setups and take 2. The other 45 are not wasted. Saying no to them is the skill.
This is also where most of the “trading is gambling” worry comes from, and it is not a silly worry, because from the outside a trader and a gambler can look exactly alike for the first few minutes. Taking every setup that looks interesting, on a feeling, at whatever size feels exciting, really is gambling. Taking a small number of setups that pass the same rules every time, at a size where any single loss is boring, is closer to running the casino. I made that case in more detail in Is Trading Gambling?.
Personally, I think this is why 15 minutes a day works. Fifteen minutes is not a productivity trick. It is about how long it takes to check a short watchlist against rules you already trust, and then close the laptop before boredom talks you into a trade you never planned.
Did I design my system, or did I find it?
I found it. A machine helped me see that.
A while ago I fed an AI 734 of my own charts, over about thirty passes, and asked it one question: what do I actually trade? It came back with near-identical if-then rules every time, and zero contradictions between them. I had been running a system for years without ever writing it down properly.
That was humbling in a good way. The edge was not some clever idea I had one afternoon. It was years of repetition, mistakes and reading (1,500+ books by now, which is a slightly unhealthy number) that settled into habits. The AI did not design anything. It excavated what was already there, and I still make every call.
What was it all for?
I stepped back at 28 and have stayed retired since. People sometimes hear that and picture a beach and a drink, which is roughly right on some days and badly wrong on most. Retirement turned out to mean getting to choose the work, rather than having no work. I chose to keep trading, to build Synapse Trading, and to see 70+ countries along the way, because a routine that fits into 15 minutes travels well.
If I had to put 15+ years into one line, it would be this: the market was never mine to control, but my own behaviour was. Most of the progress came from making that behaviour a little more reliable each year. My own longer origin story, including the parts that went wrong, is in My Trading Journey, and one of my less flattering trades is in How I Screwed Up My Tesla Stock Trade.
So, a few questions to sit with. Which of your rules only exists as a sentence? What is your real win rate, and how big is your average loser compared with your average winner? And when did you last close the laptop without trading, and feel good about it?
I would genuinely like to hear your answers. Reply in the comments, or drop me a message.
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About the author. Spencer Li is the founder of Synapse Trading and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe). His trade log is public: every trade since April 2024, dated, losses left in.
Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.
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Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.
