Lessons
🧠 Psychology
Biases, discipline, drawdowns. Master the trader in the mirror.
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The four demons, up close
FOMO, fear, greed, hope: meet the voices that trade your money for you.
- FOMO: anatomy of a chaseThe Trading course named the four demons that wreck traders. This course puts them under the microscope…
- Fear: why we sell bottomsBrain scans show financial losses lighting up the same regions as physical danger. The amygdala fires in…
- Greed: the doubling-down spiralGreed, in trading, is mostly a refusal to accept a small loss. In 1995, trader Nick Leeson kept doubling down…
- Hope: the demon that holds losersHope sounds harmless: 'it'll come back.' Finance professor Terrance Odean studied thousands of broker accounts…
- Review: name that demonQuick map before the quiz. This unit's demons (FOMO, fear, greed, hope) are the raw emotions underneath the…
Cognitive biases
Loss aversion, echo chambers, anchors, hubris: the bugs in everyone's mental firmware.
- Loss aversion: losses punch twiceKahneman and Tversky measured it: losing €100 feels roughly twice as intense as winning €100 feels good. That…
- Confirmation bias: the echo chamberOnce you own something, your brain becomes its PR department. You hunt bullish takes, skim past warnings, and…
- Recency & anchoringTwo biases tag-team your sense of price. Recency bias projects the recent past forward: three green years…
- Overconfidence: above average, all of usIn one famous study, 93% of American drivers rated themselves above the median, a statistical impossibility…
- Review: debugging the firmwareThis unit's field guide: loss aversion (losses hurt ~2x, so frames manipulate you), confirmation bias (you…
The narrative trap
Stories, gurus, and viral feeds: how a good tale empties a portfolio.
- Stories beat statisticsEconomist Robert Shiller calls them narrative epidemics: stories that spread like viruses and move billions…
- Guru worshipImagine 1,000 accounts predicting markets by coin flip. After three calls, about 125 hold a perfect record…
- Social media moneyThe algorithm has one job: keep you scrolling. Confident, extreme, urgent posts win reach; careful, hedged…
- Base rates: the antidoteThe antidote to stories is one question: 'Of everyone who tried this, how did it go on average?' That's a base…
- Review: the trap, mappedStories move money because they're contagious, not because they're true. Guru records are survivorship…
Know thyself
Tilt lights, risk personality, and an honest audit: meet the trader in the mirror.
- Tilt signalsPoker players call it tilt: playing worse BECAUSE you're losing. It announces itself before it costs you…
- Your risk personalityThe Investing course split risk into three dials. Capacity: what your finances can absorb (pure math)…
- The honest self-auditYou already own a psychology dataset: your own trade history. Not the P&L: the decisions. Your five worst…
- Your demon profileUnit 1 named four demons; your audit shows they don't visit equally. Most people have a lead demon their…
- Boss: Demon hunterThe same four whispers from Unit 1, and the same defense: hear them, name them, and let your written rules…
Rules & checklists
Willpower fails on schedule. Build rules that decide before the demons wake.
- Willpower is a batteryLeague 1 introduced you to the demons: FOMO, fear, greed, hope. League 2 builds the cage. Psychologists once…
- The pre-trade checklistIn 1935, Boeing's Model 299 (later the B-17) crashed on its demo flight because a veteran pilot forgot one…
- If-then plansPsychologist Peter Gollwitzer spent decades studying 'implementation intentions': plans shaped as 'if…
- Friction designYou beat temptation with distance, not strength. Trading apps are engineered the other way: one-tap orders…
- Review: the rulebookFour ideas, one theme. Willpower is unreliable exactly when markets get interesting, so decide in advance. The…
Journaling
Memory spins, data doesn't. Turn your trades into numbers you can fix.
- The four columnsAsk any trader how last month went and you'll hear a story: polished, flattering, and quietly rewritten by…
- The review cadenceA journal nobody reviews is just a sad diary with numbers in it. The value is in the ritual: a weekly review…
- Your expectancyExpectancy is the average result of one of YOUR trades, computed from YOUR journal: (win rate × average win) −…
- Patterns in the mirrorAfter fifty entries, your journal stops being a log and becomes a mirror. Losses that cluster right after big…
- Review: the black boxAircraft carry black boxes because human memory of an incident is worthless in an investigation. Your journal…
Environment design
Screens, size, sleep, and your circle: engineer the world that trades through you.
- Alerts, not screensEvery glance at a live chart is an invitation to act. At small timescales, ticks are mostly noise. Yet each…
- Size until sleep is easyOld Wall Street story: a worried investor asks how to stop losing sleep over his positions. The answer: 'sell…
- The body keeps the scoreEvery trade you take is decided by a brain in a body, and that body keeps the score. In lab studies, staying…
- Your market circleLeague 1 showed how echo chambers form; now design your way out. The handful of people you talk markets with…
- Review: the fortressEnvironment design in one breath: alerts so the market interrupts you at chosen levels instead of drip-feeding…
Process goals
Grade the decision, not the dice: poker thinking, process streaks, and the finished system.
- Good decision, bad outcomeJudge a decision by its outcome and poker players will name your sin: resulting. Fold correctly and the next…
- Streaks done rightStreaks are rocket fuel for habits, and you're using one in this app right now. But point that fuel at the…
- The scorecardA process scorecard grades each trade on the things you controlled: was it a written setup? Sized within the…
- The system builderStep back and look at what you've built this league. Rules and if-then plans decide in calm what tired-you…
- Boss: The systemFour tools, one mission: move every important decision out of the hot moment and into calm, reviewable…
Drawdown psychology
Losing well is a skill. The spiral, revenge trading, and the art of walking away.
- The spiralAlmost no account dies from one bad trade. Autopsies of blown accounts show the same pattern: a normal loss…
- Revenge tradingAn honest story you'll hear in every trading community: "I lost €400 before lunch. Fine, within my plan. By…
- When to stopCasinos never set loss limits for you. That's your job. A daily loss limit is a number, decided in advance…
- Coming backAfter a bad run, most traders come back the worst possible way: full size, next morning, determined to "prove"…
- Review: storm survival drillThe spiral starts with a thought, not a loss: "I need it back NOW." Revenge trading is painkiller shopping…
Handling wins
Winning is dangerous too: euphoria, house money, and the discipline of paying yourself.
- Euphoria riskAsk around: most traders' worst blowup came directly AFTER their best month. A winning streak quietly rewrites…
- House money fallacyA gambler up €500 says "I'm playing with the casino's money now" and bets it recklessly, because losing it…
- Paying yourselfPlenty of traders have 'made' six figures and never bought a single thing with it. The gains lived on a screen…
- The win reviewEveryone reviews their losses. Pain demands answers. Almost nobody audits wins, and that's where the rot…
- Review: winning without losing itEuphoria is tilt with better marketing: same missing plan, nicer soundtrack. Profits are your money the second…
The long-game identity
Think in hundreds of trades, detach from the P&L, and make peace with doing nothing.
- Cohorts of 100A casino doesn't panic when a gambler wins a hand. It knows the edge shows up over thousands of hands, not…
- You are not your P<he most corrosive sentence in trading has three words: "I am down." Not "my position is down." I am. When…
- Regret minimizationBefore founding Amazon, Jeff Bezos says he used a "regret minimization framework": imagine yourself years from…
- Boredom toleranceThe Investing course made the case with numbers: time in the market beats timing it, and missing just the…
- Review: the long-game mindThink in cohorts of 100: single trades are coin flips from a weighted coin. Keep the wall up, because you are…
The master's mindset
Patience, the endless loop, the wisdom to sit out, and everything Formiga taught you, in one place.
- Patience as edgeEvery mechanical edge gets competed away. Speed? Firms spent hundreds of millions on microwave towers to shave…
- The practitioner's loopSurgeons debrief operations. Pilots log every flight. Chess masters study their own lost games harder than…
- Knowing when NOT to playThe Macro course taught you that markets have weather: risk-on, risk-off, rate regimes that reprice…
- The graduate's synthesisLeague 1: know the enemy, its four demons (FOMO, fear, greed, hope), the bias firmware underneath them, and…
- Boss: The master's mindLeague 1, lesson one: a FOMO buy is a relief purchase, and the reliever usually becomes the exit liquidity. If…