The Most Dangerous Kind of Winning
The Market Loves to Reward Bad Behavior
Every trader has experienced this at some point: a flawless trade that loses money, and a completely reckless trade that makes money.
Good Trades Can Lose. Bad Trades Can Win.
A good trade isn’t one that makes money; it’s one that follows your process and aligns with your edge. A bad trade isn’t one that loses; it’s one that breaks your rules and wins anyway.
Watching short-term winners or losers tells you almost nothing. Edge doesn’t reveal itself over a handful of trades — it takes hundreds. You can run positive expectancy trades that lose 10 trades in a row, or completely reckless trades that win 10 in a row. In either case, the sample size is statistically meaningless.
But here’s where most traders get into danger: They double down on the reckless trades because they are randomly working.
That’s the most dangerous phase for a trader. The same behavior that randomness rewards early on is the exact behavior that guarantees you’ll eventually blow up.
It’s like being handed a loaded gun that only fires every so often. You think you’ve mastered the trigger until one day it fires at the wrong time.
The Market Loves to Reward Bad Behavior
The market loves to reward bad behavior—especially early. It lets you taste success from doing the wrong thing because now it has you exactly where it wants you.
When you win from reckless decisions, you don’t just earn money—you earn confidence. And that’s far more dangerous. The market wants you to keep repeating that same reckless behavior. It wants you to size up. It wants you to start believing that rules don’t apply to you. Because when the reversal comes—and it always comes—it takes everything back.
The market doesn’t blow you up right away. It feeds you first. It seduces you with streaks of profit, then punishes you for believing those profits were skill.
That’s how most blowups originate. Not from a single bad day, but from a series of small rewards for bad behavior.