Common trading mistakes — and how to avoid them
Most losing trades share a handful of causes, and almost none of them are about analysis. The first is position sizing: risking so much on one trade that a normal losing streak becomes unrecoverable. The rule that fixes it is boring — decide the maximum loss per trade before opening it, and never widen it.
The second is revenge trading: after a loss, doubling activity to "win it back". The market does not know your balance, and it does not owe you a rebound. The practical fix is a cooldown: after a hard stop, the platform stays closed for the rest of the day. Automated strategies have an advantage here — they cannot feel insulted by a red number.
The third is ignoring costs: commissions and spreads are certain, gains are not. A strategy that trades twice as often pays twice the costs to maybe make the same gross return. Check net performance, not gross. And the fourth — confusing a bull market with skill. In a rising market almost every purchase looks brilliant; sizing that felt fine then fails exactly when the trend turns.
Manual trading vs automated trading
Manual trading means you decide every entry and exit. Its strength is adaptability: you can read context, skip a trade that "looks wrong", and react to news no model has seen. Its weakness is consistency: you get tired, bored, euphoric and scared — often in a single afternoon — and every emotion wants to edit the plan.
Automated trading executes fixed rules without mood. Its strength is discipline at 3 a.m. and its speed of reaction; its weakness is literalness — a rule is followed exactly, including when the market has changed character and the rule has stopped making sense. That is why automated does not mean unsupervised: someone still decides which rules run, with what limits, and for how long.
In practice the two are complementary. Many users run automated strategies for the routine part of their plan and keep a small manual allocation for situations that need judgement. The platform supports both, and the Getting started guide shows where each setting lives. Whichever you choose, the determining factor is the same: the quality of the plan, and the honesty to follow it.
The psychology of a trader
Trading psychology is not about staying calm — it is about arranging your trading so that being uncalm cannot hurt you. The emotions that damage accounts are fear (closing winners too early, hesitating on planned entries) and greed (oversizing, extending past your planned exit). Both are answers to the same underlying question: "what if I miss it?" The professional answer is: you will miss things, constantly, and it costs less than forcing them.
Three practices hold up. First, write the plan before the session — asset, entry condition, size, exit, invalidation — and treat edits during the session as forbidden. Second, journal every trade in one line: reason, outcome, emotion. Patterns appear within weeks, and they are usually emotional patterns, not analytical ones. Third, define your day in advance as finished: a daily loss limit and a stop after a target hit both cut the worst hours of trading — the ones right after strong feelings.
Automation helps precisely because it externalises discipline: the rules you wrote on a calm evening execute on a wild Tuesday. But the psychology does not disappear — it moves up a level, to choosing and sizing strategies, and to leaving them alone long enough to work. That is the real skill this platform asks of you: decide well once, then let the system be systematic.