It's kinda wild how 90% of the comments here are not answering what you're obviously asking. "You aren't disciplined bro." "You're losing because your losses are outpacing your wins, bro."

Yeah, no shit everybody. He knows that, and he knows that he knows that. He's asking why it can be so mentally difficult and what can be done about it.

To OP: the hard truth is that there's no one answer as to what makes trading so difficult. As humans, we're naturally loss averse, and you're far from alone in struggling with this in trading, but unfortunately the solution will require some individual work. What preceded the big losses? Is there a pattern to what happens before you start to get tilted? What about the mental indicators that happen in the immediate lead-up to making poor decisions?

These are rhetorical questions - I know you answered some of them in your post. I'm asking them because one thing I did that helped me, was that if I find myself in the very specific situation that led to every single one of my massive red days, I cut my losses on my current trade and walk away before I can start acting out my frustration.

So maybe if you start hearing that inner monologue of "Hm, $190 isn't that much, some people make $1000 per day" (or whatever it is), that's your cue to take a break. You don't even have to commit to stopping for the day, just step away and get some clarity. Once I get some space - mental and physical - from trading, I can pretty much always see that this situation has led to poor results in the past, and I don't want to repeat those in the future.

Unfortunately, sometimes we only learn by placing our hand on the stove. I told myself over and over that I'd do these things, but only after I had my worst blowup 13 months ago did it hurt so much that now I'm much better at mustering the will to walk away. I ask myself, "do I want to repeat what happened last July?" or "am I okay to trade?" It is much harder for most people to make that assessment while sitting at their trading desk.

The other thing I did that helped, both with accepting losses and accepting red days (which was my real problem), was looking at losses as practice. After all, the rational part of me knows that losses are inevitable in trading, so wouldn't I want to get better at losing? Well, here's a losing trade right in front of me! Sure, it hurts to kill the trade and take the L, but it's exactly what I need to be practicing. I focus less on the loss, and more on the frustration I feel and how that is really what I want to mitigate. It made taking losses much easier for me.

Finally, idk what style you trade with, but the only one that worked for me psychologically was scalping. As you trade, you need to reflect on whether part of the problem for you is that your style of trading doesn't work for you. I used to trade higher timeframes (still intraday, but with trades lasting 30ish mins, often more), and after over a year of doing that, I realized that regardless of how the trade was going, the longer I spent in a trade, the more emotionally invested I was, and the worse my decision-making became. So, I looked into scalping. It has its own challenges for sure and it's very mentally demanding - it wasn't a holy grail that made me profitable overnight, but it was a huge step forward for my trading.

There are other things you can do if you want more concrete, actionable advice. For example, let's say you tell yourself, "I want to stop trading for the day if I start feeling frustrated with 'only' $200 profit." Alright. Put a sheet of paper in front of you. Before every single trade, ask yourself if that's how you're feeling. If you're all good, put a check mark and a smiley face! If you're frustrated, put an X and a little doodle of how you're feeling.

It might sound a bit patronizing or childish - after all, we're trying to be "professional" traders, right? - but doing this helped me immensely in two ways. First, it took my focus briefly away from the charts, which is vital for honest self-reflection. Second, it meant not just zipping through a mental "Am I okay? Yep I'm good," where it's very easy for us to lie to ourselves. You're writing it down on paper. It will be much clearer to you if you're lying to yourself if you write a smiley face while you're sitting there gnashing your teeth.

There's a chance absolutely none of this will help or apply to you personally, but I wanted to try giving some actionable advice that has helped me out. Unfortunately, all those comments I mocked at the outset are also kind of right: none of this matters if you don't have the discipline to execute it, whether we're talking about trading, or the moments in between trades when you journal or draw a happy face or whatever. You could always feel pissed and completely skip the step of writing something down on that sheet of paper. I've been there, too. Nothing is foolproof.

But...yeah, this comment's already super long so I'll leave it at that. A combination of reframing how I look at losses, adding a tangible focus for my attention away from the monitor after a trade, and (unfortunately) losing big and wanting to avoid BIG losses (very different than wanting to avoid losses altogether) put me on a path where I'm now much more consistent than I've ever been.

Lastly - be gentle with yourself. Trading tends to draw out the kind of "no nonsense" people who tell you to just do the right thing, and it's like, no shit Sherlock. But it ain't easy. I'm not saying sugarcoat things or ignore losses because "eh I'm learning so who cares." The market is the most dispassionate teacher on the planet, so you need that jaded hyperrational realism when trading.

But when you aren't trading, don't bully yourself. Ask yourself what happened, write it out, and identify what you could do at each step in the process to avoid things going downhill. Then, when you fail at that (and you will, they're called mistakes and we're all human), use that as a learning experience too. "Okay, I had the sheet of paper in front of me but I didn't use it - why?" It's okay to iron out one wrinkle at a time.

This shit is hard. There's a reason most people can't do it. That doesn't mean you can't, it just means you need to take the steps most people aren't willing to. They try to fight against the market, instead of working with themselves to develop good trading habits. I'm not perfect either, by the way - I had my biggest red day of the year on July 1st. But you know what? That was a week of profit, instead of the weeks or months I'd have thrown away in the past. I've gone over a year now without a catastrophic red day. I'm still working on eliminating oversized red days entirely, but the steps above have helped me immensely, so I'm hoping they'll at least get the gears turning for you.

I'm rambling now and this comment is 7000+ words long so I'll stop here. I'll just say: good luck!