The Day I Stopped Calling Myself a Trader
Are you trader or do you want to be called trader?
A few years ago somebody asked me what I do for a living.
Without even thinking, I answered, “I’m a trader.” It wasn’t until later that day that I realized how strange that answer actually was. Because yes, I trade. It’s how I make money, it’s a skill I’ve spent almost six years developing, and it’s something I genuinely enjoy. But when I thought about it more, I realized trading isn’t who I am. It’s simply one thing that I do.
I don’t think I always looked at it that way.
Somewhere along the journey, trading slowly became my identity. Everything in my life revolved around it. My social media became about trading. My daily routine revolved around the markets. Most conversations somehow ended up being about trading. Even when people introduced me to someone new, I wasn’t Luke anymore. I was “the trader.”
At first that sounds completely normal. If you dedicate years of your life to mastering something, of course it becomes a big part of who you are. The problem starts when your identity becomes dependent on your performance.
Suddenly every trade carries much more weight than it should. A winning month doesn’t simply mean your strategy performed well - it means you’re doing well. A losing month doesn’t feel like normal variance anymore. It feels personal. It feels like you’ve somehow failed as a person, even if you followed every single rule perfectly.
I don’t think I fully understood this until last year.
Earlier that year I was traveling around Southeast Asia, trading a few hours a day and living a life that younger me would’ve considered impossible. Then I came back home, the markets changed and I went through one of the worst periods of my trading career. I lost thirty-six trades in a row while staying completely disciplined. You read it right - 36. I didn’t revenge trade. I didn’t increase my risk. I trusted my data because I had spent years collecting it.
The strange part was realizing how much those losses affected me outside the charts. I caught myself questioning things that had nothing to do with trading. My confidence dropped, because somewhere deep down I had allowed trading results to determine how I felt about myself. I had stopped seeing trading as a profession and started treating it as my identity.
One of the reasons I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu this year was because I wanted something that had absolutely nothing to do with the markets. I wanted to be terrible at something again. I wanted to walk into a room where nobody knew or cared what my trading results looked like. On the mats, nobody asks how much money you’ve made this month. Nobody cares how many followers you have. The only thing that matters is whether you show up, learn and improve.
It reminded me that life feels much healthier when you have more than one thing that gives you purpose.
If trading is your only source of confidence, every drawdown becomes an identity crisis. If trading is your only passion, every losing streak starts leaking into every other area of your life. But when you have family, friends, hobbies, sports or other meaningful things outside the charts, losses stay where they belong. They remain trading losses instead of becoming life losses.
Ironically, I think becoming less emotionally attached to trading has made me a better trader.
I don’t need every trade to prove that I’m good enough anymore. I don’t need every winning month to validate my decisions, and I don’t need to panic every time I hit a difficult period. The markets don’t owe me anything, and they certainly don’t determine my value as a person.
I think that’s one of the biggest mindset shifts a trader can make.
Treat trading as a craft. Treat it as a business. Treat it as a profession if that’s your goal. But be careful not to let it become the only thing that defines you, because markets change, strategies evolve and every trader eventually goes through periods where nothing seems to work.
When that happens, it’s much easier to survive if your entire identity isn’t sitting inside your brokerage account.
Bless you all.
Luke