It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Life stuff, personal stuff, family stuff—you know, all the stuff. But I’m hoping to get back into a rhythm again. Not daily (let’s be real), but at least once a week. And yes, I will finally finish the series I started forever ago. Probably.
In the meantime, something new has been going on: I’ve been working on getting my mom back into trading. She hasn’t touched charts in a long time, so we started all the way back at the beginning. First, just remembering how NinjaTrader works (“Oh right, you have to login now when you launch NinjaTrader…”). Then, building from there: recognizing setups, learning rules, and eventually working toward structured trading systems.
Going through that process with her has been like holding up a giant mirror to my own trading. It made me re-think what really separates the traders who make it from the traders who don’t. And after watching someone relearn from scratch, I’m convinced the #1 reason most traders are unsuccessful is this:
👉 Unintentionality.
And when I say “traders,” I don’t just mean the ones actively clicking buy and sell every day. I’m talking about anyone trying to learn to trade with the ultimate goal of becoming successful. That includes aspiring traders who have never placed a live trade, the ones still grinding in sim, and the ones who’ve been at it for years but never truly defined their process. Whether you’ve withdrawn thousands in profits or you’re still stuck setting up NinjaTrader for the first time—if your actions are unintentional, you’re setting yourself up for the same struggles.
Here are some of the most common ways I see displaced intention in trading:
- ⏸️ Not starting at all: Deciding there’s just too much to learn so you delay… and delay… and suddenly six months have passed and you’ve mastered exactly nothing.
- 📺 Watching the wrong stuff: Skipping educational content that’s actually aligned with what you’re trying to learn, but somehow you’ve got time for a two-hour “How I Turned $500 Into $5 Million” YouTube video.
- ❓ Never asking questions: Not asking where to start, how to start, or even what matters at your current stage. Instead, you “figure it out on your own”… which usually means spinning in circles.
- 🎲 Setup hopping: Abandoning your own plan because some random Twitter account posted a PnL screenshot. Now you’re trading their strategy you barely understand, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.
- 🌍 Market tourism: Bouncing between ES, NQ, crude, gold, micro this, mini that—because surely one of them is the “easy” market.
- ⏰ Timeframe roulette: Trading whenever you happen to be free, ignoring the fact that setups and volatility look very different at 9:30 AM versus 2:45 PM.
- 🔍 Setup fuzziness: Having a “general idea” of what a setup looks like but no real definition. Then you wonder why two trades look the same to you—one wins, one blows up your account.
- 🎯 Setup obsession: Believing that if you just find the perfect setup, you’re done. As if time of day, position sizing, trade management, and limits on winners/losses don’t exist.
- 💳 Evaluation reset fantasy: Starting a brand-new eval account, changing your setup (again), but still having no stats, no defined system, and no clear rules for when to trade or stop. It’s the same as before, just with a fresh countdown timer.
- 💸 Revenge clicking: Deciding the chart owes you money after a loss, so you click faster and with bigger size. (Spoiler: it doesn’t owe you anything.)
- 🎨 Chart doodling: Drawing so many lines, fibs, zones, and indicators that your chart looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. But hey, at least it looks technical.
- 📈 Simulator heroics: Killing it in sim because you risked 30 contracts with no stop. Then wondering why live trading feels “different.”
- 📢 Blind belief: Never challenging conventional wisdom like “the trend is your friend” or “never fade the gap.” Traders repeat it like gospel without ever asking does this actually fit my strategy?
At the root of all this? It’s not that traders are lazy—it’s that they’re busy doing things that look like effort but aren’t actually intentional.
The intentional trader, on the other hand, knows exactly what they’re looking for before they open the platform. They’ve defined their setups. They’ve written down their rules. They’re not shocked by outcomes, because they’ve already accounted for both the wins and the losses.
As I get back to posting, I want to keep the same approach I’ve always aimed for here—being intentional with the content. Not in the sense of trading performance, but in making these posts useful. Sometimes that means helping the trader who’s just starting out and searching for real, actionable content. Other times it’s for the trader who’s basically an inflatable tube man outside a used car lot—lots of movement, but no real direction. And of course, plenty of you fall somewhere in between. Wherever you are in your journey, my hope is that what I share here gives you something solid to grab onto.
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