The Problem With Always Needing to Be Right
One of the strangest things trading has taught me has nothing to do with charts, risk management or market structure.
When I first started trading, I thought the best traders were the ones who could predict the market better than everyone else. I believed profitability was about having better opinions, making better forecasts and somehow knowing what price was going to do before everybody else did. Looking back, I don’t think I understood what trading actually was.
The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve realized that professional trading has surprisingly little to do with being right. In fact, some of my best months came from periods where I was wrong over and over again. The only difference was that I had accepted being wrong as part of the business instead of treating it like a personal failure.
That’s a lesson I wish I had understood much earlier.
I think a lot of people - not only traders - build their identity around always being right. You see it everywhere. People argue online not because they want to understand each other, but because they want to win. They defend opinions they’ve held for years simply because admitting they were wrong would hurt their ego. Somewhere along the way, being correct became more important than learning something new.
Trading doesn’t let you do that for very long.
The market doesn’t care how convinced you are. It doesn’t care how beautiful your analysis looks or how many reasons you have for taking a trade. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong and your account reminds you of that very quickly.
At first I hated that.
Every losing trade felt like proof that I wasn’t good enough. I would spend hours trying to figure out how I could have avoided it, convincing myself that profitable traders somehow had a way of eliminating losses completely. It took me years to realize that the goal wasn’t to avoid being wrong. The goal was to become comfortable with being wrong often enough that it stopped affecting my decision-making.
Once you remove your ego from the equation, a losing trade becomes information instead of an insult. A drawdown becomes feedback instead of evidence that you’ve failed. You stop defending your opinions and start testing them. You become much more curious because you no longer need reality to agree with you.
I’ve noticed that this way of thinking has slowly started affecting areas of my life that have nothing to do with trading.
A few years ago, admitting I was wrong felt almost uncomfortable. If somebody challenged my opinion, I immediately wanted to defend it. If I had spent weeks researching something, I felt like changing my mind somehow meant all that time had been wasted. Today I look at it very differently. I don’t mind saying, “I don’t know,” because I think it’s a much more honest answer than pretending to have certainty where none exists. I don’t mind changing my opinion when new information appears, and I certainly don’t mind admitting that I misunderstood something, because I’d rather improve my understanding than protect my ego.
I think that’s one of the biggest gifts trading has given me.
I’ve been experiencing something very similar since I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The mats are brutally honest because there is nowhere to hide. If your technique isn’t good enough, somebody exposes it within seconds. If you make the same mistake over and over again, you’ll find yourself in the exact same bad position over and over again. Nobody cares how confident you sounded while explaining a technique or how many instructionals you’ve watched at home. The only thing that matters is whether you can actually apply what you’ve learned against someone who is resisting.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that both trading and BJJ are constantly teaching the same lesson.
Bless you all.
Luke