Awefulize

It might sound harsh, but that's a preventive step in trading. You awefulize; you prepare for the worst. Constantly. You can't take any significant risks.

It is based on the counterintuitive principle that if you have a drawdown of 50%, you need now to make 100% to get back to the breakeven point.

Picture a drawdown of 90% down, and you now need to make 999% profits to go back to breakeven.

In addition, there is another counterintuitive principle that in a sample size of 1000 experiments, 13 losing trades in a row is near guaranteed.

Combining those two statistics makes you unable to afford more than 2% of total capital risk per individual trade to avoid any drawdown larger than 30% since it is so hard to recover from that.

Unfortunately, as much as it is easy to control one's position size, protecting all of one's positions is more challenging, making it necessary to awefulize. It would be best if you thought of any negative scenarios that might be possible, from hardware to software to human errors to the cat on the keyboard.

This is one of many aspects where a trader must take different roles, like the glass half full versus the glass half empty at various times in this game.

Flexibility and checking one's ego are essential in market participation.

While it is essential to be confident and a glass-half-full person while executing trades and merely following self-imposed rules at that part of trading, it is just as necessary to be a glass-half-empty awfulizing character when creatively thinking about worst-case scenarios to be prepared.

Examining markets and oneself through various angles and lenses is crucial for the aspiring trader.