Remove These 5 and Make Big ProfitsBitcoin / U.S. dollarBITSTAMP:BTCUSDDavid_PerkHey what's up guys, welcome to the second part of article where Im describing the most mistakes we do as traders. Here are five more that slow almost every new trader down on the road to consistency — the slower-burn habits that keep you stuck even after the account survives. If you haven't read Part 1 yet - check it here I describe there psychological effects of oversizing, revenge trading, moving stops, wrong capital, and FOMO are the ones that blow accounts fastest. This piece assumes you're working on those and picks up where they leave off. None of these mistakes mean you're not cut out for trading. They mean you're on schedule. I've made most of them myself. So have the traders who eventually got consistent. Charts change every day. Sessions change. Instruments change. But the person staring at the screen doesn't — and that's usually where the damage starts. These five won't always wipe you in a week — but they'll keep you flat, frustrated, and repeating the painful mistakes from Part 1 for years if you don't address them. 1️⃣ Confusing Activity With Progress 🧪 What it looks like: you've blocked out three hours to trade. Sitting through them without clicking feels like failure. So marginal setups get promoted. "It's close enough" becomes an entry criterion. Experienced traders describe the job differently: most of the work is waiting. Your edge — whether that's a London continuation after a clean Asian range, or a Model 1 at 50% of the CLS range — is not present all day. Trading when it isn't there isn't extra practice. It's paying a subscription fee to variance. The impulsive trader takes the same two setups plus six forced ones. Same edge, buried under noise — spread, commissions, and emotional capital spent on trades that were never part of the plan. ✅ The correction: measure discipline by the quality of trades taken, not the quantity. A day with zero trades because nothing valid appeared is a perfectly executed day. It my strategy it means: - Messy or wide Asian range? Often a no-trade day for London. - No manipulation yet? No trade. - Premium zone but you're trying to go long? No trade. - Order block hasn't closed on the correct timeframe? No trade. Write down exactly what a valid setup looks like — sweep, displacement, SMT, OB close, R:R — so "close enough" has something concrete to fail against. 2️⃣ Abandoning a Strategy After Three Losses 🧪 What it looks like: find a method → trade it two weeks → hit a losing streak → conclude it's broken → find a new one. Repeat for two years. Come out with no data on anything. Even a solid edge — say 50% win rate with wins twice the size of losses — will regularly produce four, five, even six losses in a row. That's not the strategy failing. That's what small samples look like. Strategy hopping is often not really about the strategy. It's a way to avoid confronting execution errors. Blaming the method is more comfortable than admitting the method was fine and you entered during the sweep, ignored HTF bias, or skipped the journal. ✅ The correction: commit to a sample size before judging anything. In CLS Lab we backtest toward 200 logged trades before live sizing. A reasonable minimum to start evaluating is 30–50 trades executed by the rules — losing streaks included. If you broke the rules on half the trades, the sample tells you nothing about the strategy. It tells you something about execution. Different problem. Different fix. Stick with Model 1 until you can answer cold: what qualifies, what invalidates, what clean looks like vs. forced. That clarity only comes from repetition — not from another YouTube strategy at midnight. 3️⃣ Judging Trades by Outcome Instead of Process 🧪 What it looks like: Trade 1: impulsive entry, no stop, chased a move after displacement already happened. Gets lucky. Wins. Brain records: "That worked." Trade 2: perfect plan — HTF CLS range context, manipulation done, H1 order block on a Daily range, fixed risk, stop below the sweep. Stops out. Brain records: "That failed." Both lessons are wrong. Together they train the exact opposite of consistency. Any single trade can win or lose regardless of decision quality. What compounds over hundreds of trades is the quality of the decisions. ‼️ After each trade, ask one question: "Would I take this exact trade again in the same conditions?" Yes → good trade, even if it lost. No → bad trade, even if it won. Some traders grade every trade A through D on process alone and ignore the profit column entirely. Over time, the account should be built from A-grade trades — and whether any particular one won becomes almost uninteresting. ✅ This is the dividing line between traders who eventually become consistent and traders who don't. 4️⃣ Trading Without a Journal (or Keeping One That Records Nothing Useful) 🧪 What it looks like: ask a struggling trader what their biggest problem is and they'll guess — entries, indicators, "psychology." Ask them to show the data and there's nothing. They're trying to debug a system with no logs. A journal is not a feelings diary and it's not a P&L spreadsheet. Its job is to make patterns visible that memory hides. Memory exaggerates dramatic trades, forgets routine ones, and quietly edits history to protect your ego. ✍️ What a useful Journal entry contains — five minutes per trade: - Setup type (Model 1, Model 2, which session) - HTF context in one line (Daily range, discount/premium, bias) - Reason for entry in one sentence - Planned stop, target, and R:R - Actual result - Screenshot at entry — sweep, displacement, confirmation - One honest line on state of mind ("calm," "still annoyed about the last loss," "entered early") The payoff comes at review — usually after a few dozen trades, when patterns surface. Journals routinely reveal things like: - Nearly all losses coming from one session (often London on messy Asia days) - Winners cut at half the planned target while losers run to full stop - A setup that feels great and loses consistently because confirmation was skipped None of that is visible without records. Each one, once seen, is fixable in a way no new indicator ever will be. ✅ The correction: log every trade. Review every Saturday with a calm mind — no open positions, no pressure. Change one thing at a time. Traders who journal aren't more disciplined by nature. They've replaced opinions about their trading with evidence. 5️⃣ Expecting Consistency on a Timeline the Skill Doesn't Allow 🧪 What it looks like: most new traders privately expect profitability within a few months. Month four arrives flat or down. Something must be wrong — with the strategy, the market, themselves. That conclusion triggers the painful mistakes from Part 1: strategy hopping, oversizing to catch up, revenge trading the calendar. Developing consistent profitability usually takes months / years, not days / weeks.. Not because the concepts are complicated — most of what you need can be understood in an afternoon. But trading is a performance skill. The gap between reading about a stop hunt and actually waiting for manipulation to finish while a live position moves against you is the same gap as between reading about swimming and swimming. It closes only through repetitions. Nobody thinks four months of casual practice should make them a surgeon. Trading escapes that logic because the barrier to entry is a phone and a deposit — the ease of starting gets confused with the ease of succeeding. ✅ The correction: replace the profit timeline with a competence timeline. Instead of "profitable by summer," aim for: - Fifty consecutive trades without breaking a rule - A full quarter of journaled, reviewed trading - One setup traded well before adding a second - 200 backtested and logged trades before meaningful live size These milestones are under your control. Profit follows them — not the other way around. 📍 THE BOTTOM LINE — PART 2 Read back through these five and notice what they share with Part 1. Almost none are about analysis. Not one is solved by another indicator or another guru on social media. They're all about the distance between knowing and doing under pressure — and about building evidence instead of opinions: - Measure discipline by trade quality, not click count - Commit to a sample size before you judge the strategy - Grade trades on process, not outcome - A journal with screenshots beats another indicator - Competence milestones before profit milestones You will still make some of these mistakes after reading both parts — probably this week. The difference is that now you'll recognize them while they're happening. Recognition is where the correction starts. The traders who eventually become consistent are the ones who stopped repeating them. Process first. Capital first. Emotion last. ❌ None of this guarantees profits. Nothing in trading does. But you'll stop wasting years on the wrong problem — and that's the first win that actually compounds. Adapt useful, Reject useless and add what is specifically yours. David Perk 🚀Boost | 🔁 Share | 💬 Comment | ✅Follow for more Education