Quite a few people have mistaken impressions about what they often call “noise”, in the markets.
I think one big reason for traders not staying consistently profitable is that they think whatever they’re doing will be safer on slower charts with larger position sizes, rather than on faster charts with a much greater trade frequency, enabling them to use much smaller position sizes for the same overall return. The important difference is that, the latter way, a really unlucky run - which we can all get, now and again - won’t kill their account.
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The main reason traders struggle to stay consistent is emotional instability and lack of structured experience. It’s not just about knowing strategies or reading charts, anyone can do that. The real challenge is controlling emotions, sticking to a plan, and continuously improving without getting thrown off by wins or losses.
I think the main reason traders struggle to stay consistent is that they don’t commit to one system only, so they keep chopping and changing whenever they have a bad run.
The reason they don’t commit to one system only is probably that they know, on some level, that what they’re doing might not really work.
The thinking is like “so I’d better try something different instead”.
The reason they know that what they’re doing might not really work is probably that they know they can’t really tell reliably whether anything works. Which you can’t altogether blame people for, because it’s actually hard to learn and not fun to teach, either.
In other words many people have a very fundamental, foundation-level building-block missing. Without going right back to the start, to correct that, all they can really do is “play on and hope for the best”. Which is therefore what they do. But with trading, that isn’t actually good enough. So most people really struggle to stay consistent, and when they’re not, they chop and change.
Apart from that, I don’t think it’s about psychology at all. Just “missing building-blocks”.And definitely not “emotional instability”!
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A common reason for lack of consistency, IMO, is the construction of over-elaborate systems by people who imagine that additional indicators used as “filters” in an attempt to cut out more losers than winners will somehow make a basically misguided system work for them.
It means that indicator enthusiasts often start off with something that happens to work for a while (often because their market’s trending reasonably well at a time they’re using MA-derived indicators, any of which would therefore work fairly well, overall), and when it inevitably hits a losing patch, they then try to resolve that by adding indicators instead of taking them away and looking at price action.
This “syndrome” is really, really common.
From my experiences, after a winning streak. I was greedy, I put in a few more trades, and they blew all my profit and led to a loss. Emotion and greed control are mandatory for a trader to be profitable.
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Straight up, it’s their emotions. Most traders freak out when things get dicey, ignore their own rules, and overtrade or move stops in a panic—those emotional slip-ups kill consistency every time.