6 out of my last 6 trades were losers and I’m just going through a very painful phase of feeling demotivated and I no longer trust my system. Up until this point I made over 150 trades and had a 4:1 win ratio and was feeling great.
The last two weeks I have had 6 loses in a row and now I’m doubting my system and my ability to analyse the market correctly. I’m actually scared to place another trade. It’s not the money that is the problem because I have great money management but it’s just the emotional defeat that is bugging me.
Has this ever happened to you? How do you get over it? I’m thinking to just take a week off and let the emotional defeat wear off. What do you do in these situations?
Yes, we have experienced that. This is what we mean with the emotional side of trading (the part you can only learn when experiencing defeat and no guru or paid lesson can teach you).
What you do: take a break from trading and assess where the problem lies. Trading with the emotions that you experience now is unwise.
Don’t see it as a competition; be humble; get emotionally detached from the money and have no opinion about what you do or what happens. Start with smaller trades to get a feelling of auto-pilot in you before you go full force again.
You need to deal with this the become a trader or else you will be an emotional wreck after a year or two.
Edit: I read some of your last posts and I think you got chewed up by the ECB-event. When I first experienced such a drawback it was a game chancer for me and I started to learn programming and trade (semi-)automated. My own assessment was that I had to cut myself out of the deal as much as I could. Changes are that your system is in order but it was the wrong market or you didn’ t execute it properly. Spent some on that while healing, don’ t force yourself to trade now when these emotions are fresh.
You are not on your own. I am certain more got chewed up last week. We probably won’t hear from them for a couple of months. Hang in there, you just graduated!!! Woohoo!!!
I am sure you read posts about - Don’t trade the news - differently now.
And remember: it is just a loss when you stop trading at all, until that time you just lend the money to someone else on the market.
Nobody could have predicted the crazy moves during the ECB rate decision last week…
There are certain market conditions where technicals and.fundamentals seem to be turned upside down: it is a time where a lot of strategies will be made useless by choppy, directionless market moves…
This is true, in different ways, for short-term as much as long-term trades; have you seen the Big Short? You can have a great idea but enter too early and you may have to tough it out for months, and it may break your confidence…How much is one willing to risk for a trading idea? For example: I shorted the London equities (FTSE100) market last summer and I held short.since, but the trend has been slow at developing and I.have had to sit through months of stalling as well as large drawdowns… In the end, my trade will work out fine, but my time span is much longer than yours and it is easier to.follow a wide theme over time… I am guessing that you are an intra-day trader: what is your strategy? Do you think that it.could work again, once market.conditions return to what they were when your strategy was performing well?
Thanks for your replies. Yes I got burned on ECB announcement but also on gold and GBP pairs. I shorted GBP pairs on Friday 11th March and my stop loss was hit but literally 3 or 4 pips and now it’s gone all the way back down. It’s so incredibly annoying when that happens but I have told myself NEVER to move stop losses but man if I had just moved it a few pips back I’d be in the trade and actually making profit now.
Just feel like the market is against me. Yesterday I made a trade on gold and about 5 minutes after I placed the trade it was down 1000pips, literally in 5 minutes! Then my stop loss was hit about 2 hours later. Just getting stupidly unlucky.
Thanks for your replies. Yes I got burned on ECB announcement but also on gold and GBP pairs. I shorted GBP pairs on Friday 11th March and my stop loss was hit but literally 3 or 4 pips and now it’s gone all the way back down. It’s so incredibly annoying when that happens but I have told myself NEVER to move stop losses but man if I had just moved it a few pips back I’d be in the trade and actually making profit now.
Just feel like the market is against me. Yesterday I made a trade on gold and about 5 minutes after I placed the trade it was down 1000pips, literally in 5 minutes! Then my stop loss was hit about 2 hours later. Just getting stupidly unlucky.
I’ve probably lost about 40 - 50 trades out of my 150 - 180 trades but I’ve never lost 6 in a row! It’s incredibly demotivating. I’m just going to take the remaining week off and let the emotional defeat subside.
Aahh yes, that is the special secret forex unit that is out to knock us retail traders out of the game one-by-one. You only see them when you have a losing trade, as that is always by just a few pips. I hate them. I suspect my broker and mother-in-law are also part of that team.
Tops and peaks are often retested. Funny enough I saw an old post of mine specifically on this matter. It dates from 2013: 301 Moved Permanently.
Hi UKForex, sorry i have pick up your post as an example on my latest post on volume without your permission. If you have some spare time now, please go through that post. It may help you overcome your conditions now.
Best Regards,
Victor Lew.
P/s: My post quiet stand out from the crowd, and i am down to 2 more post before i say goodbye. Many Pips to all. Cheers
Losing streaks suck, bro. I found the following principles helpful
Reduce your reward:risk. I usually trade 1:1 (or close to it). With a breakeven system, it provides a 50% of winning. But just as important, it provides a good mix of wins and losses (e.g. WLWLLWLWWWLLWLWLLW). I found that systems with a high reward:risk (like 3:1) suffer horribly from losing streaks (e.g. WLLLLLWLLLWLLLLWLWLLWLLLL).
Reduce your position size as you lose. I normally trade around 1.5%-3% per trade, but after a losing streak, I drop it down to 0.5%-1.5%. It’ll help stop the nosedive in your equity curve.
Thanks for your tips. I’m honestly not concerned about losing the money because I made so much more than I lost. It’s just the 6 losses one after the other that bugs me.
I am still way ahead of my starting equity so it’s really not the money that is bothering me. Now I’m at the stage where I am doubting my trading strategy, my analysis of the markets and confidence is low. Never mind though, this is a first for me so it’s understandably hard for me to take in but once it’s happened a few times it will just be normal to accept emotionally.
You should take a break after one or 2 losses. ^ losses one after one is not a good sign .It shows either you did multiple trading or try to recover loss immediately . One can recover but with a new plan . Just after loss it seems difficult because our thinking and motivation is totally changed.
I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to revenge trading and I never fall into this trap. The trades I lost were just poor trading decision. Plain and simple.
One should not “take a break” after one or two losses. You should actually expect to lose one or two trades depending on how much trades you do. I typically trade for 1 - 5 day period and will place between 8 or 9 trades. I would expect to lose 3 or 4 of these.
Did you ever have times where you won 6 in a row? If you did and you didn’t doubt your system then then there’s not much point doubting it now when it flips the other way. Over a long enough period of trading you’ll go through periods where your results vary from what you would see as your statistical norm. Doubting your system because it runs into a patch akin to flipping tails 6 times in a row doesn’t make much sense. Stick with the system and see if this was just a blip and results revert to the mean. If things keep going wrong then you might need to re-evaluate the system. But 6 trades isn’t a large enough of a sample to suggest that something is inherently wrong yet.
Yeah I agree but it’s hard to to think you’re not doing something wrong. I’ve had a winning streak of about 9 or 10 before which felt great but it’s hard wired into ourselves that loses are always more power than winning.
If you found a wallet with £100 in it you’d be pretty happy but if you lost your wallet with £100 you’d be annoyed and that losing is always worse than winning. Basically we as humans value loses more importantly than winners, with pretty much everything.
Since making this post I’ve got over the losing streak anyway and I’m going to wait for all these central banks to get their reports out the way and continue trading after that.
Keep the faith.
We all have losing streaks, just be wary when you have a winning streak as its easy to think you’ve cracked fx and thats when you can trade yourself into trouble.
Good luck
Yes, we have experienced that. This is what we mean with the emotional side of trading (the part you can only learn when experiencing defeat and no guru or paid lesson can teach you).
