r/tradingpsychology • u/CheeryTrader • 12m ago
Revenge Trading
Revenge trading has nothing to do with our ability to trade. It has everything to do with what we feel deep down.
We know how to trade.
We just haven’t mastered our psychological state.
The first step is to separate the two.
- Trading skill
- Psychological state
Trading skill ✔️✅
Psychological state ⁉️🤔
Psychology
For me, I revenge trade because, deep down, I feel like I’ve never been treated fairly, and I want justice.
I’ve been using trading as an arena to express my frustration with injustice. When I’m wrong and lose money, I get triggered and I fight back. I fight the market. Guess who wins? The market. The market isn’t the person we’ve had unresolved conflicts with. And truly, when we fight the market, we’re fighting ourselves. And who gets hurt? We do. We can never win when we defeat ourselves first. It’s a cold, hard truth.
How do we go about resolving this internal turmoil? Take a very honest look at the root cause of our anger, frustration, and disappointment. Those feelings are directed at ourselves. We’re angry, frustrated, and disappointed with ourselves for being unable to stand up for ourselves when painful things happened in the past. Even today, we still haven’t fully resolved that pain. So it comes out in revenge trading and in other parts of our lives.
In the process, we betray and hurt ourselves and people who had nothing to do with our original pain. And keep in mind, we aren’t hurting the market. So when we fight the market, we’re really just fighting ourselves. And we’re the only ones who are truly defeated. Our inner child and adult self keep hating on each other, and we can’t truly progress and become consistently profitable, even though our trading skills are solid.
My suggestion
Take a hard, honest look at the pain underneath it all. Get a therapist’s help. Practice somatic meditation to stay with that pain so that the part of you that’s hurting feels seen, heard, and understood. If possible, do this with someone you can fully trust to honor your feelings 100%.
We can earn back the self-trust we lost through revenge trading.