More people can go on a diet and lose weight than can learn a trading strategy and become profitable.

More people can go to medical school and become a doctor than can learn a trading strategy and become profitable.

More people can read a book on a subject and know more about said subject than can learn a trading strategy and become profitable.

What similarities do all of these comparatives have, and why do we see such a huge percentages of unprofitable traders?

The answer lies within a false dichotomy of linear expectancy of observed results.

If one reduces caloric intake, they will lose weight as a linear function of that caloric intake deficit.

If one progresses through a year of medical school, they are 25% through their base qualification to practice medicine.

Each book read on a subject imparts specific, explicit knowledge on that subject. You can observe a linear progression of knowledge acquisition.

How does trading differ?

Trading requires you to learn several technical & fundamental confluences, adhere to them with perfect discipline, all whilst dynamically managing a finite equity curve.

This process takes thousands of hours with almost no linearly correlated return.

This is referred to as your building edge or alpha in the markets.

If you do all of these things, profitable trading demands that when perfectly executing this edge, you actively accept losing money, sometimes for extended periods (drawdowns), while accepting this too is a part of your edge.

There is no linear association of progress in this situation. You essentially must blindly trust that capital weight and time will exponentially return for you.

Our brains don’t like this. We break our rules.

We stray from our edge in an attempt to falsely emulate some sense of linearity of expectancy; this makes our primordial brains happy.

We revenge trade to end up green on the day, because surely the amount of work we have put in means we MUST generate a return on capital each day/week/month.

Our brains cannot fathom our edge would ever see multiple days, or even weeks, drawdown our net equity, despite this being an absolute certainty of probabilities within any defined edge in the market.

We over leverage after a series of losers in a futile attempt to rationalize this linear expectancy after a series of losing trades.

So yes. Trading, paradoxically, is much harder than most professions.

The issue is not learning a profitable system.

The issue lies within convincing ourselves that our system truly IS profitable despite the myriad of short term signals that convince us of the contrary.

Trading is a fundamental contradiction of our prescribed notion of progress.

But then again, if we were to truly evaluate the other comparatives I gave you, you would see that trading really isn’t any different than anything else in life we falsely associate linearity with.

It is objectively much easier to lose 10 pounds when severely obese, than it is to shed 10 pounds at a normal BMI. In fact it’s probably a multiplicity of efforts greater to lose weight as you begin shedding pure excess fat.

One just attributes the immense dopamine response of the initial weight loss with a positive linear expectancy for the rest of the journey. Think newbie gains in the gym….

You get the point I don’t need to convince you that a first year medical student has anywhere near 25% of the knowledge as the graduated doctor…

So perhaps the issue isn’t that we don’t perceive trading towards profitability as linearly associated, but that we falsely attribute this quality to most other things in our life.

This simple understanding should empower you to reframe your current perspective & situation with trading.

You can do this. You might not believe it possible to the same extent as other goals you have but I promise you can do it.

Trading really is like anything you’ve ever accomplished.