Davester

🇵🇹🇨🇦 | 4 years of trading gold | Sharing my journey & my trades

"1 good trade a day keeps the job away"

[Davester @davester200x]

For 3 years I’ve been grinding to become a trader. I paid for the courses, went into debt, failed, and made every mistake in the book while slowly rebuilding my psychology/hedge. I’ve documented all of it on IG stories but never on X. That changes today !

[PJ Trades @PJtrades_NQ]

How to pass an eval:
→ aggressive sizing

How to get a payout:
→ conservative sizing

That's the ONLY thing that should change.

Sloppy habits on the eval = a blown funded account = stuck in eval jail.

[Andrew Menaker PhD @Andrew_Menaker]

I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between dopamine, effort and waiting in trading.

Because trading creates a strange problem for the brain.

Think about what happens when you're sitting in front of your screens with no position on.

You're watching. Waiting. Nothing quite meets your criteria.

Then you enter a trade.

Immediately your internal state changes. You have risk on. Price is moving. P&L is changing. There is anticipation and stimulation.

Something is happening.

That experience can become reinforcing even when the trade itself isn't particularly good.

Over time, a trader can unintentionally learn to associate being in a trade with stimulation and being flat with boredom, discomfort or the feeling that he's missing something.

This is one reason overtrading isn't always solved by better discipline.

You can have rules. You can tell yourself to be patient. But if your nervous system has learned that taking action relieves the discomfort of waiting, you've practiced a very powerful loop:

Discomfort ➡️ trade ➡️ relief.

And modern life gives us plenty of practice with this.

Bored? Pick up the phone.

Uncomfortable? Scroll.

We rarely have to sit with an uncomfortable internal state for very long.

Trading often demands the opposite.

You prepare. You wait. You pass on trades that are almost good enough. You watch the market move without you. Sometimes you execute extremely well and still lose money.

Part of developing as a trader is changing what you experience as rewarding.

You waited 45 minutes and didn't take the mediocre setup?

Good.

You felt anxious as the market moved without you and didn't chase?

Good.

You took the planned loss instead of moving your stop?

Also good.

This matters because markets sometimes reward terrible behavior.

You chase, break your rules, size too large and make money.

Your brain received a reward even though your process was terrible.

The opposite happens too. You wait for your setup, manage risk properly, execute exactly according to plan and lose.

Good process. Negative reward.

This is why I spend so much time with traders working on what happens internally before the mouse gets clicked.

What does waiting actually feel like?

What happens in your body when the market starts moving without you?

Can you experience the urge to participate without immediately turning that urge into action?

Rules and intentions matter. So does training your nervous system to tolerate the space between opportunity and action.

Eventually, restraint itself can become rewarding.

Passing on a mediocre trade starts to feel like good trading.

A planned loss feels different from an impulsive one.

And being flat doesn't automatically feel like you're missing out.

Sometimes the discomfort you're feeling is simply the experience of waiting for your market.

And sometimes the best trade you make all day is the one you wanted to take, but didn't.

Flat is a position.

If this resonates, follow, like, r/t, BOOKMARK this post #tradermindset #tradingpsychology $ES_F $NQ_F
$SPY $QQQ

[PJ Trades @PJtrades_NQ]

Early in my career, the mental battles started getting to me.

- I doubted I could even trade.
- I doubted I could ever make money.
- I doubted I actually understood my strategy.
- I doubted I knew what I was doing at all.

and the only thing that fixed it was taking a break. A day off... maybe a full week.

Sometimes that's the best thing you can do.

Protect your mental health. Without it, you will not be profitable.

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Your entire life changes the moment you realize you have main character armor.

You're going to make it through every hard, insane, surprising thing the movie of your life throws at you except for one: the end.

So you might as well dream big and shoot big because you're going to make it through, no matter what, except for the one time you don't.

And the moment that happens you don't have to watch the movie anymore.

[Simon Lejeune @lejeunesimon]

Wealthsimple is about to save billions for Canadians who aren’t even clients.

Competition works.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

The cortisol spike from exercise suppresses the next cortisol response from a stressor.

Exercise before stressful things.

[J trader @jtrader]

A profitable strategy is useless if your nervous system can't tolerate the uncertainty required to execute it.

[Karun Pal @karunpal]

Urgency drains your energy. Don't rush into things. It will only make you more anxious. Not everything needs to be solved today. Slow down. Take a breath. Let things unfold. Give yourself enough space to think, feel, and respond instead of constantly reacting. Be slow. Be calm. Be fully present in everything you do. What I've learned is that some of the best decisions in life are made when you stop trying to outrun the moment.

[Jacob @Jacobtradesz]

Controversial take: the best thing that ever happened to my trading was going 50k in debt

Because at that point quitting was more expensive than learning

Some people need zero options before they create one

[Kevin Xu @kevinxu]

$1M was rich in 1990

now it’s $4M

by the time you retire, it’ll be $16M

this is incredibly important to understand

[Jacob @Jacobtradesz]

Things that improved my trading more than indicators ever did

→ sleeping 8 hours
→ trading one session
→ walking away after 2 trades

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Slow down and remember this:

Most things make no difference.

Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant.

Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive.

Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

[Brez @brezscales]

If being judged scares you

Wait until you see what staying average costs

[Steven Goldstein @AlphaMind101]

"It's Not the Markets We Conquer, It's Ourselves"

Trading success isn't about finding the perfect system — it's about mastering the war within: the ego, the fear, the self-doubt. The best traders (like the best athletes) stay fully present, they move on from things that didn't work out/shots they missed.

Know thyself.

[tomtrades @itstomtrades]

You're not emotional. You're just trading too big.

Think of it like the gym. You lift 100kg for a year, it stops feeling heavy. You trade a 10k account for a year, 100 dollars a trade stops feeling heavy.

Jump to a 50k account and you've just loaded 150kg on the bar.

Same technique. More pressure. More mistakes.

Progressive overload works in trading too.

[Davester @davester200x]

@Jacobtradesz Facts bro!

[Jacob @Jacobtradesz]

The best traders I know risk heavy and trade less

everyone else risks small and trades 15 times a day hoping something hits

less trades more conviction

[Andrew Aziz @BearBullTraders]

Success in trading is boring. That's why so few achieve it.

[Davester @davester200x]

How I got those big payouts ?
Less trades, more size

[Davester @davester200x]

Called the buy and the short today! Good way to end the week 🤑