They Were About to Give Up

(Click to Play this short video compressing 4 years of trading results into 17 seconds)

Happy New Year.

For those of you who know me, you will know that my interest in trading and investing has always sat on the human side of the equation.

Emotional wellbeing.
Psychological health.
And the physical consequences that follow from both.

As a trader myself, I am acutely aware of the question that inevitably comes up.

What does any of this actually have to do with results?

How do we know that feeling well, calm or regulated has anything to do with the bottom line?

How do we distinguish between losses that are a normal and expected part of a healthy system and losses that are driven by a trader’s internal state? Alternatively, were the losses derived from forced errors or unforced ones?

When we review our trades, our framing and our opportunity set, how do we know whether we are seeing clearly or through clouded lenses? And when we review our results, are the outcomes purely those of chance or did we in some way make them happen?

I find this endlessly fascinating, because we all accept that markets operate in the realm of fear and greed, supply and demand, essentially human emotion. And yet many of us still believe that we can somehow outthink or engineer our way around the impact of our own psychology.

I have spoken before about behavioural economics.
The behaviour of the group.

But we are the group.

Each of us is a bundle of behaviours. From a distance, those behaviours aggregate into patterns and trends that we analyse and trade. But each of those data points is itself made up of many smaller ones. Beliefs. Habits. Emotional responses. Conditioning.

Which is why I will always invite you to look inwards.

If we want to understand our results, we have to understand what is producing them.

That requires a level of honesty that is not always comfortable. A willingness to be vulnerable with ourselves. And a readiness to track the things that actually matter, not just the things that are easy to measure.

A Case Study

Over the years, I have often been asked whether I can prove a correlation between mindset work and trading performance.  

This is admittedly a tough ask and I’ve come up with various ways to try to track the seemingly unquantifiable.

Most of the people I work with are private, deeply humble or quietly superstitious about their results (vis a vis positive results..."this can not last forever" and for those not doing so well, "it will always be this way"). Others simply do not want attention.

So I approach this topic carefully.

With genuine gratitude and sensitivity, one individual I have been working with for nearly three years has given me permission to share their results, anonymously.

When they first came to me, they were ready to give up entirely. This was not down to a lack of knowledge.  They had invested time, effort and money into their craft and had honed their process. They were frustrated. Tired. And questioning whether the internal cost of continuing was worth it. The results they were producing were not satisfactory.

The work we did together was not on their specific strategy. I did not coach trading decisions, techniques or systems. The system is theirs. Entirely.

What we worked on was everything else

I wonder, as you look at the results above, what are you thinking?

• Are they real?

• Are they sustainable?

• What system is this individual using?

• How did they achieve these results?

• Who is this person?

If you are impressed by the results, then what impresses you specifically?

• The ‘break out’ (or should I say… ‘break through’) that caused the results to move out of their own sideways pattern

• The consistent grind ‘up and to the right’

• The lack of large drawdowns

• Something else?

If you are sceptical in any way - what comes up for you?

• These results are not realistic nor sustainable...

• Feeling badly about your own performance

• Something else?

In answer to some of those questions above in no particular order:

• This person wishes to remain anonymous.

• The results from March 2023 onwards (when the uptrend starts) are real, collated from weekly accountability reports and dialogue.

• The sideways period before March 2023 is a “best guess” by me as the individual really did not want to share their results when we met.  Not even to ‘baseline’. Since they were ready to throw in the towel I figure sideways is probably the most generous estimation to help illustrate the point.

• I am personally encouraged (and yes impressed) with the break through that caused the shift from sub satisfactory results into a momentum that this individual has been able to sustain. 

So What Made the Shift?

The results you see above are not the product of a new edge.

They are the expression of alignment.

I have always believed that focus, dedication and discipline matter.
That objective review, subjective adjustment, resilience and endurance eventually show up in the numbers.

What this case illustrates is what becomes possible when the internal system stops fighting the external one.

I know many of you will want to know what changed.
What the system is.
What the secret was.

There isn’t one.

The system has remained broadly the same, with small, sensible tweaks over time. There are periods on the chart where the trader stepped away because conditions were not right. Hallmarks of professionalism.

The inflection point came from doing the work that most people resist (and came after a 3 hour conversation).

The kind of self-examination that can feel uncomfortable, tedious or irrelevant.
Looking at the shadow side. Digging for the root cause.
Understanding why we do what we do.
And how those behaviours quietly shape results.

Over time, new habits and behaviours became ingrained, reinforcing that consistent performance up trend.
Not forced.
Embedded.

For those looking for proof of correlation between inner work and outer results, this is as close as I can offer without attaching wires, sensors or gadgets to someone’s body.

I share this now because we are at the beginning of the year.

At the end of last year, I wrote about positive expectancy from an emotional standpoint.
At the start of this year, many of you may be setting goals or resolutions.

My hope is that this prompts you to reflect not just on what you want to achieve, but on what is actually producing your current results.

A great deal of decision-making is seemingly driven by the logical mind.
Many actions are actually driven by what sits underneath it.
Not always aligned with one's intentions.

If nothing else, I invite you to sit with a simple question:

Are you willing to do the work required to change?  

Whether with me, with someone else or on your own.

And if you are not ready for deep work, I offer you this simple exercise to make a start:

• What went well last year?

• What did not?

• What will you change?

These questions will not uncover every root cause, but they will give you a baseline.

Closing Thoughts

This is the first time I have shared a client’s results in this way. 
I’ve tended to avoid doing this as it’s so easy to miss the point. 

Just in case it’s not clear, my intent here is not to sell a system, claim credit nor promise outcomes.

The intention is simply to show what is possible when someone commits to working on themselves with the same seriousness they bring to their trading.

The shift that transforms one from sideways to 'break out' can be surprisingly fast.
To turn this into a consistent, aligned, sustainable outcome at the level of one's identity takes a combination of subconscious reprogramming alongside consistent accountability coaching.

If this article has piqued your interest and if you feel ready to explore what is possible for you, my inbox is open.

All the best for 2026.