Losses are a part of trading, but how do you feel when you take a loss? Does your stomach churn and your heart rate increase? The feeling after a loss can last for minutes, hours, and sometimes days. Taking a loss is definitely not as fun as taking home the trophy. But if we, as traders, can understand why it is much. harder to take a loss in our profession than in another profession, we can understand and accept the situation more easily.

The profession of a trader is often compared to that of an athlete in a sports competition, as both are performance skills. While there are many similarities between trading and professional sports, there is one key difference that makes trading much more difficult to master. That is the losing part.

In sports, a loss is clearly defined by the time and place, the rules, the referee, and the fact that the opponent only played better than you. Here, the trader is responsible for stamping a loss. To be more clear, it is the trader’s decision on whether and when they would like to finally give up.

The human instinct is to fight. We all want to be on the winning side. Evolution has conditioned us to think that we should do everything in our power to win. Our ego is part of this mechanism.

Either choosing to follow your instincts every day, or maybe multiple times a day — which is against human nature and why it is so hard to maintain. We also see many traders who would let their losses grow and be eaten up by large chunks of their accounts. We are simply not programmed to give up as we grow up.

The game of chess teaches us that we are capable of making tactical sacrifices in battle in order to win. We can give up our queen to protect our king, or trap our opponent in order to win the game. As traders, we allow ourselves to accept losses as part of our sacrifices.

However, the value of a loss is more abstract and less clear-cut than you think. We see this in chess, where the player knows which instruments will remain available even after you have made the decision to sacrifice.

In trading, there is no opponent to influence your decision to give up. You work on your own and take your wins and losses on your own. The right time for traders to give up can be now or later, whereas in a game of chess, the player must make his tactical decisions on the spot.

Even though traders have the tools and knowledge on how to trade well, when you are in a trade, you remain vulnerable to the mercy of the market and all you can do is enter or exit.

How long? How long? The answer is only after. Choosing the time to give up can also give a positive meaning, since taking the time to accept your loss almost prepares you mentally because you know what to expect around the corner.

Trading is known to be counterintuitive, so what you think is the right time to give up may turn out to be wrong. When traders find themselves in a losing situation, they can onlydecide whether to give up or not. It is their choice to use their intuition to accept that loss or not, for better or for worse.

Is it easier than knowing that your opponents can knock you out at any moment? The answer may be… not quite. It is very difficult for traders because they still have to rely solely on making that key decision to quit.

This is not the only aspect that contributes to a trader’s huge difficulty with losses, and it is the ego and self-awareness that comes into play with trading success. When traders are in a losing situation, there is nothing they can do about it. Although losses are a part of

trading, they must redirect their thinking and ego to focus more on their successes and less on their losses. This is what makes trading more challenging in a unique way.

We don’t like to be wrong. Admitting that we are wrong is one of the hardest things to do.

But in trading, accepting it will save you thousands of dollars, and it’s actually the best thing you can do for yourself and your trading account.

Learn to accept trading losses, learn from them, and move forward.