I have no idea why I have this feeling that writing this post might be a form of acceptance and relief for myself. Maybe it is because people say that step 1 of fixing a situation is accepting that there is a problem, and step 2 is identifying what that problem actually is.
Sometimes I wonder why I have this crazy tendency to put myself out here instead of writing in my journal and keeping everything private.
I have tried that. It did not work. So here I am. Maybe it is because I started this blog by pouring my heart out without filtering myself, and over time, writing here began to feel like a form of therapy that old school pen and paper sometimes cannot give me.
I do not know.
I am rambling at this point because I am about to be really vulnerable by spilling the tea, my tea. My dirty, disgusting cup of tea, all over the place. This is going to be full of shame, guilt, and regret, and hopefully by the time I reach the final paragraph of this post, I will feel lighter and more liberated.
I think this is also the first time I am openly talking about this topic: trading.
I started trading in 2018 or 2019, during a time when I felt really lost in life. I did not know what I wanted to do when I first moved back from Australia, but the idea of making money just by clicking buttons amazed me.
It was an awful roller coaster ride. I am not blaming anyone or anything except myself. Despite all the learning, grinding, and pain, I now look back and realise that a lot of it happened because I never truly built a solid foundation in trading.
It is like spraying tons of perfume instead of taking a proper shower and scrubbing yourself from head to toe. That is me. Sometimes my P&L (profit and loss statement) smells like an expensive Tom Ford fragrance, and sometimes it smells, and even looks, like shit.
To my dismay, for the longest time, I genuinely had no idea what was wrong.
I took courses, read psychology books, journaled my trades, watched countless YouTube videos, spent weekends making notes, you name it. Yet I still could not understand why I was not seeing consistent results.
I had wins, both big and small. But at the same time, I also had losses in XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL sizes.
I felt like a hamster running on a wheel, getting thrown off by inertia, then getting up and jumping right back on. That cycle went on for years, until two weeks ago.
I nearly blew my prop firm account in phase one.
Before taking my first prop firm challenge, I gave myself a solid six months to prepare, especially since I had pivoted from equities to gold and forex trading. (It is like a safari versus a zoo. Still animals, but completely different species.) I read a lot of books, did plenty of demo trading, and to make things more realistic, I even opened a small hundred-dollar live account to get the real feel of trading.
I was not thriving, but I was surviving. And somehow, I convinced myself that surviving was good enough. Pfftt. Talk about accepting mediocrity with low standards.
My trading buddy then said to me, “Why not just sign up for a prop firm challenge? Take the smallest one possible to reduce the stress. You will never feel ready anyway.”
So I took the challenge at the start of November, thinking I could easily survive. I mean, who would blow this account, considering I had managed to survive on one hundred dollars for months?
Boy, was I wrong.
This whole prop firm experience felt like a 照妖镜 (zhàoyáo jìng), which literally means a demon-revealing mirror.
I thought that after everything I had been through over the past few years, I had become more composed and emotionally steady. But just two weeks into the prop firm challenge, my inner demons were exposed in ways I had never experienced before.
I overtraded. I overleveraged. I chased trades out of spite and desperation. I layered entries by coming up with excuses for why I should not exit, even when the setup clearly showed early signs of weakness. I did things I had never done before, not even during my worst phase of trading equities.
And while I was in that state, I did not even realise how out of character I was acting, let alone stop myself.
I was down (all the effing way) to the last $99.90 before my account would have been completely stopped out when I finally snapped back into awareness. I got so scared that I basically became WOKE on a whole different level. It was a wake-up call that felt more like a massive slap in the face.
At that point, I was not afraid of the P&L anymore. Deep down, I knew I would only lose the registration fee. It was not the money that scared me. It was me.
I was seeing a side of myself that I did not even know existed. I was behaving like a gambler or an addict who had completely lost control.
That was when I truly took a step back.
For the first time in years, I realised that it was never the strategy, the indicator, the time frames, or whether I was trading equities, forex, or gold. It was me. I was the culprit. Why did it take me so long to see that I was the common denominator in every single scenario?
So I started digging deep.
Thankfully, I had a trip to China coming up right when all of this happened. Being without my laptop turned out to be exactly what I needed to clear my head. I usually travel with a Kindle no matter where I go, but not this time. I needed real quiet, real space, and real time alone to figure out what this demon inside me was actually about.
Now that I am back after two weeks of nonstop inner self-review, here are my findings.
In line with what I wrote in my previous post, I realised that I was gripping my P&L far too tightly by tying it to my self-worth. I did not see that this attachment was coming from desperation and a lack of inner stability. I believed that if I traded long hours, it meant I was hustling and therefore deserved to be paid by the markets. In reality, I should have been waiting patiently for clean, high-quality setups instead of chasing profits. If I wanted an hourly wage, I might as well not learn how to trade in the first place.
As mentioned earlier, I never truly got clear on my foundational knowledge because of something called complexity bias. I kept overcomplicating things by constantly consuming more information. What I should have done instead was return to the basics. Trading is ultimately just numbers. I am naturally sensitive to numbers in everyday life, and I am actually a smart and conscious shopper in most areas, so why was I not applying that same mindset here? It is not that different from shopping for a good deal.
Tying these two together, I realised that the demon was never just fear or greed on its own. It was the constant need to prove something. The worst part was that I did not even know what I was trying to prove. Was it to prove that if I make this much money from trading, then I am set for life? Or was it to prove that I was right about the direction, even if the timing of the entry and the risk I took were wrong?
That is a dangerous place to trade from. Only now do I truly understand why spiritual teachers place so much emphasis on the intention behind a thought or an action. Intentions create a domino effect. They can either work in your favour or quietly sabotage you, keeping you stuck in circles if you do not know where to untie the fucking knot.
I was not trading the market. I was trading my demons, my emotions, my ego, and my distorted intentions.
Once I saw that clearly, a lot of things suddenly made sense. The overtrading. The forcing of setups. The inability to walk away after a loss. The rush to take small profits while letting losses run, praying for a rebound. The constant raising of the bar made me focus more on lack than on gratitude. I was no longer acting from rationality, but from a series of “I feel” decisions, which is obviously not a system or a form of smart, calculated risk management. And the market does not reward desperation. It amplifies it.
Then came the moment of disgust. I had this weird feeling stuck in my throat, like I was about to throw up (literally), and it lingered for days. But I swallowed it, along with my ego.
A tiny voice in my head said, “Let us try something different.”
Instead of obsessing over some number in my head that I thought would mean I was set for life, why not try living as if I were already abundant, and stop thinking, worrying, and living in fear and desperation?
Throughout my trip, I kept asking myself, “How would you think, act, and feel if you were already abundant right here, right now?” I also started asking, “Who am I when things do not go my way?” And more importantly, I asked, “Can I be the type of person who stays grounded, patient, and rational without needing to prove anything?”
This prop firm challenge was not just a trading milestone for me at this stage of my life. It did more than test my trading skills. It reflected everything back to me, as a person, with no filter. No excuses. No hiding. From now on, it is about looking inward.
I do not have all the answers yet. I am still learning. Still unlearning. Still sitting with the discomfort of seeing myself more clearly than I ever have before.
But this time feels different.
This time, I am not trying to fix myself by adding more. I am stripping things back.
I am learning to separate my self-worth from my P and L. To see trading as a long-term practice instead of a daily judgment. To treat it like a game, not a personal battle.
Maybe that is what this whole journey was trying to teach me all along.
So no, this is not a success story. Not yet. This is not a redemption arc or a motivational post. It is simply an honest snapshot of where I am right now. A moment of clarity that came from almost blowing an account and finally being forced to look in the mirror.
The demon-revealing mirror did its job.
I do not know exactly where this leads next. But at least now, for the first time, I know what I am working with at its core. And somehow, this feels like a real starting point, even if it is from the ashes.
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