Profitable trading is boring

There is a major misconception around trading. If you look at Instagram or TikTok, it is full of “traders”, traveling the world with hot girls, while making a fortune on their phones / macs, posing with a Rolex, in front of the Lambo. Everything is new, shiny and exciting! The reality is slightly different. Profitable trading is boring AF. I’ll try to explain the why, the best I can. Just don’t expect an exciting article, I suck at writing, as I’m sure you will soon find out.

Getting to the mindset of being profitable (yes, it is a mindset), is not as easy as it seems. Many people try to sell you that idea with their signals, courses and mentorships, going along the lines of “just buy this and that, and you will be profitable and live the Instagram life”. People tend to fall for the easy solution, same as I did in the past. In 99% of the cases it is just a business, money machine, trying to make a good living off people who look for financial independence. Becoming consistently profitable requires a lot of really hard work, frustration and pain. Most give up because they don’t have a strong enough “why” driving them or simply lose all their money. Spoiler alert, trading is one of the difficult things you will do in your life but if you push through the pain and failures, it is more than worth it (or so I hope).

Let’s try to understand why trading itself will become boring at some point. How does a typical day of a profitable trader looks like? I will skip the daily routines, which you must have, and focus purely on trading. It will typically look like this:

1. You look at your charts, identify areas which are potentially interesting for you.
2. You refine your analysis, likely using multiple timeframes.
3. You set alerts in the areas you are potentially willing to execute a trade in.
4. You wait. Sometimes for what feels like a very, very long time. Sometimes it actually is a freaking long, boring time.
5. Alert pops up (that’s as exciting as it gets).
6. You check the charts, go through all your criteria and if all of them match, you execute and leave the screen.
7. After you reach your target or get stopped out, you fill your boring-ass spreadsheet, documenting what happened and capturing any potential lessons-learned.
8. The end. Go to step 1 and repeat.

How do you execute a trade idea? You don’t want excitement here for sure. You execute it without any emotion. You are not afraid of being stopped out and you are not euphoric about the potential gains. You execute because it fits your trading plan, you have seen this setup 1000s of times, and have done it over and over again in the past. In fact you’ve done it so many times that it’s boring. You have no expectations regarding the outcome. If you get stopped out, fine, that’s the cost of doing business. You know that with every new trade you pay the market for an opportunity to make money. If you hit the target, your statistical edge played out in your favor. Awesome!

Independent of which scenario occurred, the trade is done for you, you tick it off mentally and look for the next one. No emotions, just the same, boring, process, over and over again.

If your trading feels exiting and your emotions range between being on the top of the world and wanting to lay down and wait for the end, you’re doing something wrong. In most cases, your risk management sucks big time and you take too large positions. If you are actually looking for that excitement, you might be better off just going to a casino. Trading is not for you, but that’s a topic for a separate post.

My routine gets to the point where it is not exciting any more. I would not say it is already boring because I still need to tweak it and I don’t always leave my trades be like a robot. However, I do feel like I am getting there.

How boring is your routine?