Two opposite mistakes. One root.
The screen is on. The market is moving. And you’re flat.
You watch a candle stretch two points, then three. Your stomach tightens. Something in you starts whispering: get in. You’re missing it. It’s leaving without you.
If you’ve traded for more than a week, you know that feeling in your body before you know it in your head. I’ve felt it more times than I can count. For a long time, I thought it was a discipline problem. It isn’t. It’s a wiring problem. And once I understood the wiring, the discipline finally had something to hold on to.
Here’s what I finally understood. When you feel like there isn’t enough, your brain tunnels. It locks onto what you’re missing and goes dark on everything else, including the long-term thinking you need most.
That’s what FOMO really is. It isn’t greed. It’s a brain convinced this move is the only move, this day is the only day, and if you don’t get it now, it’s gone for good.
Here’s what nobody tells new traders. That same wiring shows up in two opposite ways. I call them the grab and the freeze.
The grab is the one everybody knows. It’s acting on impulse just to make the feeling stop. You chase the move you missed. You jump back in right after a loss to get it back. You add contracts because the last trade has to be undone, right now.
And it gets worse after a loss. A loss hurts a lot more than an equal win feels good. Put that on top of a scarcity brain, and a red trade doesn’t feel like information. It feels like danger.
I know this one personally. My worst days never came from being wrong about direction. They came from size decisions made in a hurry, right after a loss. Every one of them was my brain trying to grab back something it thought it couldn’t afford to lose.
The freeze is the opposite, and it’s quieter. It fools a lot of good traders.
Your setup prints. Everything you planned for is right there. And you don’t take it. Or you take it, and close it the second it goes green, long before your target.
I did this more times than I can remember when I started trading. I’d cut a winner simply because I saw green. Then it hit me: if I don’t hold the trade to the full plan, my results are nothing more than a coin flip.
It feels like caution. It isn’t. Gay Hendricks has a name for it in The Big Leap: the upper limit problem. Each of us carries an internal thermostat for how much good we’ll allow ourselves, and when we get close to the ceiling, something pulls us back down.
At the screen, that looks like hesitating at the perfect entry, or taking one point on a trade built for three.
Same scarcity brain. This time it’s protecting the little it has instead of reaching for more.
So if both mistakes come from the same root, the fix has to go to the root too.
For me, that came from an old idea of Stephen Covey’s: scarcity mentality versus abundance mentality. The scarcity person believes there’s one pie, and every slice he misses is gone forever. The abundance person knows the pie keeps coming.
The market is the most abundant thing I’ve ever studied. Miss a ten-point move, and there’s another one in six seconds, or tomorrow, or next week. When I finally believed that in my gut, not just my head, both mistakes started to lose their grip. I don’t need to grab, because there’s always another trade. And one loss stops feeling like ruin, so I can actually pull the trigger instead of freezing.
But a belief won’t hold on its own on a bad morning. Abundance has to be backed by rules you set while you’re calm.
For me, that means a fixed size that doesn’t move after a loss. A hard stop built into the order before I ever enter. A mapped target, and if there’s no level, there’s no extended hold. I take the small win and move on. And permission to log off. Closing the laptop after an hour is a decision, not a weakness.
I’d rather be a 50% trader with 100% discipline than the other way around. With a good risk-to-reward, that first trader makes money. The second one eventually doesn’t.
So next time you feel the pull, either one, stop and ask yourself:
Am I acting from scarcity, or from my plan?
If you’re chasing because you’re afraid of missing it, that’s the grab. If you’re frozen because you’re afraid of losing what you have, that’s the freeze. Both are scarcity. If you’re acting because your setup showed up at your level, with your size and your stop already set, that’s the plan.
You don’t have to win every trade. You just have to stop letting an old fear make your decisions for you.
Just like a good cigar, stay patient, let it burn.
— Chris
