Handling Losses
A 1-minute lesson from the MarketPro academy, one of 20 in trading psychology.
No strategy wins every trade. A trader with a genuine edge still loses 30-60% of the time depending on style.
Losses are a cost of doing business
No strategy wins every trade. A trader with a genuine edge still loses 30-60% of the time depending on style. Losses are not malfunctions; they are the tuition the market charges for access to winners. The goal is not avoiding losses — it is keeping them small, planned and emotionally survivable.
Good losses and bad losses
- A good loss: valid setup, correct size, stop respected. The process worked; the outcome was one draw from a probability distribution. It deserves zero self-criticism.
- A bad loss: oversized, chased, stop moved, rules broken. Even if small, it signals a process failure that will scale up later.
Judge every closed trade by which type it was — profit is a misleading referee on any single trade.
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Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Step 4 of 10 on Trading Psychology
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Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.