Written by In our culture, when success starts becoming difficult and setbacks keep piling up, there is often an explanation waiting for us someone is trying to block your breakthrough.
Business isn’t working? Someone is blocking you.
Things suddenly start going wrong? Someone is behind it.
And when you combine that mindset with trading, you get a particularly dangerous cocktail.
Trading is already difficult enough. You can do everything according to plan and still lose money. Then you lose again. And again. Eventually, your brain starts looking for an explanation.
You start thinking, “There has to be something else going on.” Maybe the broker is hunting your stops, Maybe someone is watching your trades, Maybe every time you enter a buy, some imaginary market villain sees it and immediately tells price, “Go down.”
Story time
A few years ago, a friend told me about a trader in Dar es Salaam. I’ll redact the names for privacy.
This was back when prop firms were still relatively new and firms like MyForexFunds and Funding Talent were around. The payout structure was also very different from what many traders are used to today.
There were no convenient biweekly payouts, you had to survive 30 days before getting paid.
This payout structure is brutal by today’s standards, but back in the day, it was normal.
You had to pass Phase 1 within 30 days, excluding weekends, which gave you roughly 20 trading days. It was a race against the clock, and that alone created a huge amount of pressure after purchasing an account.
You had to make sure that when those 30 days were up, you had either reached the target or at least kept the account at break-even or in profit to qualify for a reset. Otherwise, the account was simply breached.
Looking back, I still think those were better days than what we have now. The time limits are gone, but firms have replaced them with a long list of micro-rules that can make the actual trading conditions even harder.
Back then, the pressure came from the clock. Today, it comes from the rules.
Trader X was doing extremely well. He was reportedly making around $8,000–$26,000 a month and had built up a streak of roughly nine months of consistent payouts.
Then the one morning in a cool London session, the wind changed.
The trader started losing, at first, nothing unusual. Losing periods happen.
But the losses kept coming.
Eventually, he reached the point where he could buy two $200K prop accounts and blow both of them within one or two days.
That should have been the moment to stop, instead, the story got worse. Over roughly three months, the trader went from consistently withdrawing money to losing almost everything.
And this is where psychology entered the chat. He started believing the prop firms were doing something to him.
“They’re messing with my accounts.”, “They’re hunting me.”, “Something isn’t right.”
So he stopped buying funded accounts. Instead, he switched to live trading with a traditional broker.
And honestly, this is where things became even more dangerous.
With a prop account, at least there is usually a defined maximum loss. With your own live account, a trader in a serious tilt can keep depositing, increasing size and digging the hole deeper.
Trader X eventually blew through his live trading capital as well, at that point, the explanation became superstition.
Maybe the broker was hunting his stops, Maybe someone was watching his trades, Maybe there was some opposing energy working against him. So he thought
If the market gives me a sell setup, I’ll buy and vice versa.
Because surely the market can’t beat you if you simply do the opposite of what it wants.
Except, It didn’t work either.
The market, unfortunately, did not care about his theory.
The dangerous part isn’t the superstition
Whether you believe in superstition, luck, bad energy, stop hunting or anything else is not really the point. The dangerous part is what happens when that belief becomes an explanation for every loss.
Once you convince yourself that an external force is responsible for your results, you stop investigating your own process.
You stop asking:
“Has my edge disappeared?”
“Am I overtrading?”
“Has my risk increased?”
“Am I taking setups outside my system?”
“Am I tilted?”
“Is this simply a normal losing streak?”
Instead, you start looking for the invisible enemy. And that enemy is impossible to defeat because it can explain literally anything.
Lose a buy trade?
Someone is blocking you.
Lose a sell?
They’re still blocking you.
Take a trade and price immediately reverses?
They definitely saw your entry.
Go long instead of short?
They knew you’d do that too.
At that point, you’re no longer trading a market.
You’re trading against a conspiracy you invented in your own head.
Losing streaks can make you irrational
This is why losing streaks are so dangerous. The first few losses are just data. But after enough losses, emotions start searching for meaning.
And humans are extremely good at finding patterns even when there isn’t one.
A trader who has made money for nine months can suddenly experience three bad months and conclude that something outside of the market must have changed.
Sometimes something has changed but sometimes you’re simply experiencing variance.
What is variance?
Is the degree to which your actual results fluctuate around your expected results.
For example, suppose your strategy has:
- 45% win rate
- 1:2 risk/reward
- Risk = 1% per trade
You might expect a sequence like:
W – L – W – L – W – L – W
But actual trading could look like:
L – L – L – L – W – L – L – W – W – L – W
Both can be completely normal for the same strategy. That difference between the expected statistical outcome and the actual sequence is variance.
Your strategy can have a 40% win rate and still produce an ugly losing streak.
This is why one week or even one month of trading tells you very little about whether a strategy works.
A useful way to think about it:
Edge determines what happens over a large sample. Variance determines how painful the journey can be getting there.
Losing 6 trades in a row isn’t automatically evidence that the strategy is broken. It may simply be variance.
The important distinction is variance vs. a broken edge. If the losing results persist over a sufficiently large sample and the statistics materially deviate from your backtest, then you investigate whether the edge has disappeared.
That’s trading. the market doesn’t owe you a smooth equity curve just because you had nine profitable months.
The lesson from Trader X isn’t that superstition is stupid.
The lesson is more important: When your trading starts falling apart, be very careful about creating an external explanation before investigating yourself.
Because once you believe someone or something is blocking your breakthrough, the easiest person to stop blaming is the person sitting in front of the screen.