Couple thoughts to get down today. I want to go through my emotional state, my weaknesses and my plan to address them as well as a small update on my progress and a brief forward looking assessment of my next 24 trading days.
So I had another mini blowup. Same formula, same story. I wrote down on a piece of paper the steps that take place through the cycle. Mastering trading won’t happen until after I master myself.
It looks like: I get stuck -> I chase getting unstuck -> I look for cheaper stocks (for more volatility given my max position size risk control) -> I trade emotionally -> I take too many trades -> I get more stuck -> I have my broker raise my risk limits -> I get substantially more stuck -> I take a break -> I use coping mechanisms -> I return still tilted -> I trade emotionally -> I lose even more -> I stop -> I use more coping mechanisms -> I sleep -> I put my risk controls back on and I trade normally for X days as if the prior day(s) didn’t happen -> I get stuck -> I repeat.
I need to permanently address this cycle or else, as I said previously: “I need to make peace with my losses or there will be nothing left to lose.”
When I was younger back in 2013 – 2018 climbing the ranks of online poker, I had a strong “mental game.” In fact it was one of my strongest advantages compared to other pros. I could handle swings better than other players and maintain my “A” game. For the poker-enabled at home, I would swing 20 buyins in a session and be zenlike about it. I played a highly volatile flavor of poker and performed exceptionally well at it, benefiting from the nonreciprocal advantages I enjoyed from my superior emotional durability. In plain english, other people inevitably got frustrated and played poorly against me, and I was there, calm and collected, ready to receive it.
My resiliency was actually a consequence of emotional distancing and disassociation. I separated myself from the losses, but the amplitude of my emotional swing, both on the felt and off it, reduced. I experienced fewer and less intense emotions. Simply put, that hampers your lived human experience. It impacts your interpersonal and romantic relationships with other people and your relationship with yourself. It is a strictly worse way to live. Interestingly, I have spoken with an alarming number of other professional poker players who used this same method, sacrificing their emotions for stoic nerves.
Somewhere between 2019 and 2022 I did a lot of work on myself, addressed my emotional handicap, broadly stopped dealing with on and off depression, and lived a generally happier life with greater (read: normal) emotional range. I became a much more emotional individual and was able to connect with people more easily and more deeply. Life was good.
The full story of what followed next, traversing private high stakes poker games and mingling among their ilk is a story for another time. But somewhere between 2022, when I became increasingly not sober, and 2025 when I got sober, my coping mechanisms from the swings of high stakes poker were drugs, alcohol, porn, video games, candy, women, whatever would help and in whatever combination. I was a very injured human being for a bit, even though this was experienced almost entirely in private away from the eyes of my social network or family. My therapist refers to the people I was around as my “lower companions.” Maybe even lower companions in high places, given the so-called class of people and money flowing around me. Simultaneously apropos and ironic in my opinion. Well since early 2025 I’ve been on a deeply restorative path and have identified, addressed, and healed a lot of my emotional wounds. Life is brighter and day to day I live happily. This is clearly the cliff notes version skipping over a lot of the pain that comes with healing. But identifying the path that led to this problem, and why my prior successful emotional resiliency is no longer applicable, is worth delineating.
It’s important for myself to understand, and it’s also important context for you to understand the path that I am required to go down to incorporate trading into my life in a way that is not a boom & bust cycle emotionally & financially but rather a process I can traverse with sharp accuracy independent of my results that can serve as a strong positive in my life, without the qualifier of “net positive” present in that sentence doing the heavy lifting of excusing the requirement of coping mechanisms to soothe myself after losses. That sounds like such a miserable existence especially if it has to be maintained indefinitely.
I have cut out all but one addiction in my life and it is one I actively manage. I’m immensely proud of that. What I haven’t done is address my ability to lose money – with grace, class, happiness or even just acceptance. In fact, even using the phrase “losing money” is missing the mark for the reframing necessary to rehabilitate my destructive trading cycle.
Equating financial loss with emotional pain will only cause more emotional pain.
Becoming emotionally disturbed from “enduring losses” has multiple negative framings baked into it.
1) It presents losses as innately negative and non-standard rather than as a natural consequence intrinsic to the competition that I willingly participate in and explicitly consent to risking funds during.
2) It ties my emotions to my results and presents negative variance as adversity to overcome in a confrontational way, rather than as a part of the process to experience and let it flow through you with acceptance.
3) To address being emotionally disturbed, it calls for some solution via coping mechanism or otherwise, which disturbs my peace and moves me further away from the man I desire to be, incorporating shame and embarassment cyclically into the process.
I believe that honest reflection is required or else I simply won’t make it. This might sound like a raw account of things, but frankly, it’s necessary and at the outset during my initial two months I think that I misrepresented to myself the degree of problem I had with maintaining a durable mental game. Some combination of historically having it be my strongest attribute and then needing to acknowledge that I am presently insufficient (and consequently undeserving) to succeed at something that I have a number of positive attributes for. It’s humbling.
It’s hard to say whether it was pride or ego or fear causing a reluctance to accept my inadequacy.
Though it hits close to home as I know what my deepest fear is.
My deepest fear is that I try my hardest at something, I give it my heart and soul, and I come up short. That I’m inadequate. And I think that this fear was coming up during my last couple months. A fear that I just didn’t “have it” anymore when it came to being emotionally resilient. That something broke when I got sober and I reopened myself to as much emotional breadth as I could, and as a result lost my disassociative emotional shield that had served me so “well” when I was younger.
I will close this section with a couple quotes that always stand out to me when I think about this subject. That “the market is a mirror,” that, “it is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves,” and that “the only person who ever beat me was myself.” All of these together relate to how I currently feel.
The market is giving me all of the feedback that I need – in terms of glaring red overshadowing minor green in my trade log and a graph going straight down – to know that I need to put a stop to this emotional spiralling cycle, I believe through reframing this variance that I willingly introduce into my life.
Well, that was a lot! But it’s good to put words to the problem. To know who’s who and what’s what.
I have a few ideas for how I will go about living this reframing. Sometimes mantras help, other times recording my screen for increased transparency and culpability. Being open about my results and tracking them in a place that I look at every day. Hard coding in risk limits or setting time based spacing requirements from raising my risk limits; requiring them in email or needing confirmation on back to back days. Baking the limitation on position size into our software. There are lots of tactical ways I can limit trading on tilt, but those aren’t addressing the root of the issue. If you use circuit breaker equivalent tech to stop your tilt, you’ll just run into the circuit breakers over and over.
What I really want to do is make peace with the fact that I am afraid of being inadequate. To make peace with the fact that I will continue to lose money for an unknown amount of time and to make peace with the fact that I cannot accelerate this process by throwing larger quantities of money at it. It cannot be forced, the only way out is through.
I truly believe deep down that I am capable of being a successful trader across whatever combination of timeframes and sets of strategies I desire. The people that I witness succeeding are no smarter or more competent or more driven than myself. I just have to put in the work, act my age, and show up everyday while working on being at peace with myself at and away from my trading desk.
I put a lot of pressure on myself, that “there’s no plan B” or “everything I want is on the other side of succeeding at this” and similar self talk. In reality, of course I have alternatives. The amount of focus, dedication, ingenuity and sheer force of will that I have applied to trading this year, if applied to anything else, would yield great results. I’m fortunate to have found something that I have a great love for. I am fascinated by the markets and I am grateful to have the time, capital, and guidance to trade.
I need to calm down, accept on a base level every inch of the path in front of me, allow it to occur exactly the way that it is meant to be, and focus on the things I can control.
There are two quotes from men much wiser than me that relate to this.
From the Aeneid: “Through chances various, through all vicissitudes, we make our way,” and from my 12 step rooms that have helped me in so many ways, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I’ve made a deal with myself. On my whiteboard next to my desk are my next 24 trading days laid out. After each day I am going to write my P&L, my max position size, and a grade of my performance that day from a process perspective. If I end up $$ from now till May 18th, I’ll up my max position size from $1.5k to $3k. If I’m net down – which a single day trading on tilt will practically guarantee – I will start again on May 19th on a rolling basis every 15 trading days or until I change it.
That’s the carrot, that’s the deal. I also need to journal and reflect my way into acceptance along the way.
Yes I want to rush things. Yes I want to get where I’m going, but I need to accept the way in front of me to be exactly as it is meant to be. And in the meantime I live a life of extreme luxury where all of my adversity is entirely in my head. The only thing I have to do is be an emotionally regulated, peaceful trader diligently working on his craft. I have no dependents, no responsibilities, nothing to distract me and many people supporting me. I can do this.
As always, OTN, one day at a time.