ET Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

I'm writing this to hold myself accountable more than anything else. If it helps someone else who is in the middle of the same mess, great. But the main reason this is going up is so that I have said it out loud, to strangers, and I can't quietly go back on it later. (Disclaimer: I did use Claude to help me write this as english is not my first language)
**The honest part first**
I have been trading for about 6 years. I have lost a lot of money. I am not going to put an exact number because I don't want the comments to be about the number, but it is enough that it has genuinely hurt my financial situation and it has been weighing on me for years. Thankfully my day job pays me shit tons of money to be ok even after losing in trading.
I have also had days/weeks where I made $10K-$20K. More than one of those days. And I gave every single one of them back, usually within the same week, sometimes within the same day, by overtrading. The pattern was always the same. Big win, brain on fire, open the platform again, take a trade that did not meet my rules, then take another one to make up for that one, and by the end of it I was either flat or red on what should have been a career day.
If you are reading this and you have done the same thing, you are not alone. I thought I was uniquely bad at this for a long time. I have since learned that basically every retail trader who sticks around long enough goes through some version of this. I'm now learning how to survive and not get lost into self shame and misery.
**Why I am writing this**
Today I had a clean trade. 0DTE SPX call, entered on a pivot setup, exited on a trailing stop at R1. Big percentage gain. And instead of feeling good, my brain immediately started running the ledger of the last 6 years. How much I was still down. How far I had to go. How I needed to keep going today to catch up.
That is the moment that has cost me every single one of those 10-20K days. And today I actually noticed it happening in real time instead of acting on it. I closed the platform. I talked to my wife about it for the first time ever and went to put my kid for a nap. And now I am writing this.
The reason I am posting the rules below AND the behavioral stuff around it is because I spent years thinking the problem was my technicals. It was not. My technicals have been fine for a long time. The problem was everything happening in **my head around the technicals**. I'm sure you have now read a 100 posts with the same theme, I'm writing this to keep myself honest and accountable because I'm on reddit regularly.
**The rules (these are on my wall, printed)**
1. 1DTE over 0DTE by default. 0DTE only when the thesis completes intraday AND the setup has a defined same-day target like pivot, VWAP reclaim, or ORB level. 1DTE for anything that needs a catalyst to develop or a trend to continue.
2. Post 10:30 AM ET entries on heavy data days. Let the chop settle, do not trade into data releases.
3. Auto stop loss and take profit set at entry. No exceptions. Trailing stop sized to the risk I actually want to take.
4. No trading the last 30 to 60 minutes, especially on mechanical flow days like JPM collar expiry or quarter end.
5. Trade on the computer, not mobile. Full chart access, full levels, full focus.
6. Take profits early and religiously. The trade does not owe me the top.
7. After one rules compliant trade, win or lose, the platform closes. Next session is tomorrow.
8. News, VWAP, Pivot Points, GEX, RSI, EMA, break and retest, ORB. These are my only tools. I am not adding anything else.
9. Indicators are signals, **not rules**. Confluence across them is what makes a setup, not any one of them alone.
10. Previous day levels **are reference points, not predictions**. I do not look at charts ahead of time and build expectations. I look at them in session and read what is actually happening.
**Why the rules are not enough on their own**
Here is the part nobody talks about. I have had some version of those rules for a long time. The reason they did not work was not because the rules were wrong. It was because I kept breaking them, and I kept breaking them for reasons that had nothing to do with the chart.
The three things that made me break the rules, in order of how much damage they did:
**Financial pressure.** When you are trading with money you actually need, every trade is carrying weight it should not carry. You make decisions differently when losing hurts in a concrete way. The pressure itself destroys edge. If the money you are trading with is money you need, the size is wrong no matter how good the setup is.
**Feeling behind where I should be.** If you have lost 50% of an account, you need 100% to get back. If you have lost 70%, you need 233%. That math pushes you toward bigger bets and shorter timeframes. 0DTE is especially seductive here because it can deliver 100%+ days. Your brain starts thinking you just need more of those. But the distribution of 0DTE outcomes includes a lot of minus 100% days too, and when you are chasing catch up, one of those erases many winners.
**Shame.** This one is the heaviest. Shame makes you hide the losses. It makes you not tell your spouse, not tell your friends, not tell anyone. It convinces you that a big winning trade will be redemption. It will not. A winning trade does not fix shame, it just turns the volume down for a day. Then it comes back. The only thing that actually drains shame is telling someone who loves you about it, and letting them still love you afterward. I did that today for the first time in 6 years. It is not a trading tactic. It is the thing underneath the trading tactic.
**On gurus**
I spent the first 3 to 5 years of this listening to gurus. RSI less than 30 buy. RSI more than 70 sell. Box theory. MACD crossovers. Bollinger band squeezes. Every course, every YouTube channel, every Twitter thread, every discord server.
Some of this helped. Not in the way it was advertised. What the gurus actually did for me was give me a vocabulary and a starting point. I learned what VWAP was, what a pivot point is, what gamma exposure means. That was genuinely useful.
What they got wrong, and what cost me years, was teaching me that rules means rules on technicals. If indicator X does Y, take the trade. That is not a rule. That is a trigger. And triggers fail in every market regime they were not designed for, which is basically every other week.
**The actual rules that matter are about the trader, not the chart**. When do you stop for the day. When do you size up. When do you walk away from a loss. When do you resist taking the next trade after a win. None of that is on any chart and none of it fits in a 90 minute YouTube video, which is why the industry does not teach it. It is not packageable, and it is not what losing traders want to hear. Losing traders want a technical answer because a technical answer means they do not have to face the psychological one.
A guru who teaches you what VWAP is and how to read it is doing you a favor. A guru who tells you that VWAP plus RSI equals an automatic trade is setting you up to get destroyed the first time the market does something their setup did not anticipate. The difference is whether they are teaching you to read the market or teaching you to bypass reading it.
I also think some gurus genuinely work for the person teaching them. They developed those rules through their own losses, and the rules reflect their own psychology and account size and timeframe. That does not mean the rules transfer to you. **My system is mine. It will not work for someone else, and someone else's system does not work for me. That took me years to understand.**
**What I am committing to**
I am not going to say I am going to stop losing money. Anyone who says that is lying. I am going to lose on trades. That is the job.
What I am committing to is:
Following the rules above, every session, no exceptions. One rules compliant trade per day, and then I am done. Keeping a journal of every trade, including the ones where I broke a rule or felt like breaking one. Talking to my wife about how trading is going, honestly, not just when it is good. Not adding new tools to my system for at least a year. Not chasing catch up. Not treating the last 6 years as a debt the market owes me, because it does not.
If you have been through some version of this, talk to someone about it. If you are in the middle of it right now, please tell someone in your life. Not a trading group, not a Discord, someone who actually loves you. The shame is the part that keeps it going, and the shame only survives in silence. I have had days where I would start jittering from the amount of money I lost and the money I made, yes in both situations.
Thanks for reading. This post is my accountability now. If you see me on here in 6 months bragging about a 20K day, remind me what I wrote.

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