Trading is poker, and most people play it like touristsUS Tech 100 CashIG:NASDAQTopChartPatternsIf you've ever spent an hour at a poker table, you've probably noticed something about the people who lose. They play almost every hand. Folding feels boring to them, betting feels clever, and by the end of the night the chips have quietly moved to the two or three players who barely did anything. I think most trading accounts work the same way, and I include my own early years in that. The decent poker player isn't trying to win every hand. He's waiting for cards that are actually good, and when they come, he tries to get paid properly. The rest of the time he folds, and he doesn't feel bad about it, because folding is most of the job. In the market, the good hand is a setup where you have some evidence the odds are on your side. Not a feeling that a stock looks cheap, not something a guy with a nice chart posted on Twitter. Something you've checked against the obvious alternative, which is buying the index and sitting on the sofa. If a pattern can't beat the sofa, I don't see why anyone should get out of bed for it. You might say you need to trade to make money, and sure, but you need to trade well, not a lot. Those are different things and people mix them up constantly. The other poker habit worth stealing is deciding what you can lose before the cards are dealt. Nobody at a serious table adds money to a bad hand hoping it turns around. Traders do it all the time, mostly because once you're sitting on a loser your brain gets very creative about why selling would be a mistake. And the last one, which is really the whole point of what we do here: count. Don't trust a pattern because you've seen it work a few times. Go and look at a lot of cases and see what actually happened. We did that with the classic chart patterns, and the honest answer is that some of them are a pair of aces and quite a few are a pair of threes that got a good reputation somehow. Do you know the odds of your next trade? The numbers are on the profile.