Trader Loses $50k
What can we learn from this trader’s loss?
Occasionally a social media trader posts a live losing trade.
And these often do the rounds with some people getting a certain satisfaction from seeing others lose… Germans call it schadenfreude.
Anyway – often you can learn so much from these live big losers;
Why?
Well, you get to see the words they use, and the body language all aligned with the actual trades and market response.
Super valuable.
So here’s one from X (I think originally on TikTok) showing a trader losing $50k
Now, it could be a demo, could be a funded account, an evaluation or it could be real money… you never know right?
Regardless, we can still learn.
Here is the clip, watch it first and then come back and see if you agree with my dissection below.
(Let’s be clear, I’m not here to be a hindsight expert and say he should have done this or that, that offers zero value. He can’t rewind the clock, I’m sure he feels awful, so the least we can do is use it as learning material.)
Maybe you see some of his behaviour in your own trading and it spurs you on to improve.
Let’s dissect:
Part 1:
He takes a reasonable entry on a bull flag dip, 20 lots and gets stopped.
So far all is normal; assuming that position size and risk were in alignment with his rules. All good.
It’s a regular stop-out. He was wrong, the market went the other way, stop protected him.
Fine.
Part 2:
Ok, so this is where things swing around…
If you notice his response to the loss. It seemed he was more bothered than he should be… He’s sighing and seems very disappointed.
And he quickly looked for another trade. To alleviate that painful feeling…
The market heads lower and he starts to call it a break of structure
“Very confident it’s heading lower”
Danger!
You should never be very confident of any trade. That opens the door to excess risk and all sorts of damaging behaviour.
Which is exactly what happened.
He sells a 20 clip (the same size as the long) and the market starts to move lower.
Note: His stop is at 16897
Now for some reason, he sells another 20, doubling his position size.
That for me was the fork in the road in this story.
He didn’t need to sell more, the price wasn’t moving in his direction, this felt like frustration at the long trade combined with the market noise in this trade playing out.
I believe his chimp convinced him to double up. After all with twice the size he’s going to feel so much better when the trade works.
And he is “super confident”…
(Notice how all his words were reinforcing this trade idea, he’s convincing himself even more that he’s right…)
At some point he then adds another 40 lots, taking his short to 80 contracts.
That’s 4 x the size of the long.
That’s not a planned add.
It’s not a considered entry..
This is purely driven by emotion. Frustration, maybe greed… He wants to almost force the market into paying him for being right.
“More size, I’ll show the market how much conviction I have”
(We could look at the price action here, but I want to stick to the mental aspect for now.)
He also moves his stop on everything from 16898 to 16909.
In seconds he’s just added thousands of dollars of risk without really considering his actions.
We know why he did that right…
He didn’t want it to get ‘hit’, the market is choppy, and he doesn’t want to get pinged out on noise… (Or that’s the narrative he’s telling himself.)
Anyway, the market pops up, and teases him for a moment.
But he knows what’s coming even though he’s hoping with every cell in his body that price reverses.
Ding – stop triggered.
Game Over.
Waves of shame, sadness, anger, and frustration.
I’m not here to point fingers, laugh, or berate the guy.
Heck, I’ve done more than my fair share of stupid trades in my career. We all have.
Mistakes happen, but risk management must must must come before anything else.
On any other day he’d have taken two 1R losses, shut it down, and been back tomorrow with a clean slate and only a 2R drawdown.
But not today.
Stay in control of your risk, watch your emotions, and consider every single click you make in your brokers platform, today and every other day from now on.
And you can avoid this.