Make It Hurt

Sean McLaughlin
November 8, 2023

Do the hard thing.

Make it hurt.

Then do it again.

If these were the first three lines people read in a book about profitable trading, odds are many wouldn’t make it past the first page.

It’s natural for humans to want to avoid pain, to choose the easy path, and to put in the least amount of work for the maximum amount of output. Business schools call this “efficiency.”

And you can find plenty of examples in the real world where this is good, solid advice.

Trading is not one of those places.

The hard truth is that 80-90% of people who attempt trading in any capacity, frequency, or timeframe eventually end up net losers.

So why would we want to choose to do what the average trader is doing? The average trader is a loser. The stats don’t lie. Don’t make this fact worse by denying it.

If the average human avoids the hard thing, and the average trader likes to follow the crowd, then this is valuable information to a trader who’s willing to take some pain. This is Information she can leverage into profits.

I’ve been asking myself about the hard things I’ve been avoiding. How might my outcomes have been different if I’d done these hard things? What would happen if I got out of my comfort zone, stopped trying to avoid pain, and allowed myself to walk over the hot coals to the other side?

I’ll paraphrase Paul Tudor Jones who once said something along the lines of: “the real profits are in catching the turn.”

Anyone who has attempted to catch a turn knows it’s hard. We’re often wrong before we’re right. Sometimes embarrassingly so. And we risk getting burned if we don’t have a risk management plan in place.

The best trading book that will ever be written will both start and end with:

Do the hard thing.

Make it hurt.

Then do it again.

Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

 

Trade 'em Well,

Sean McLaughlin
Chief Options Strategist
All Star Charts, Technical Analysis Research

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