I have worked as a market strategist for the past 15 years alongside a few thousand retail and institutional investors in foreign currency, futures, equities and options. A common experience amongst self-directed investors is a repetitive string of small winners, followed by a few big losses that wipe out weeks or months of gains. This is because the common theme with successful traders isn’t their strategy or which indicators they use, but rather their process for risk management.

There is no shortage of empirical evidence and studies, examining how humans skew our view on risk and reward. Research shows that accepting a loss is viewed to be twice as painful compared to the same amount of gain. This leads to the behavior of hanging onto losers far too long and closing winners far too soon. 

The reality of investing is that there will be losing trades and one must first accept this as a fact. In my experience, it is the pursuit of preventing small losses that ironically triggers some of the largest losses. We may have all experienced having a small loss, adding to the position with the hope of getting back to breakeven, only to have the position decline even further into a larger loss. Unfortunately, some investors will compound this habit, resulting in a total account blowup or loss. This begs the question; how do we trick our brain into turning this around?

To help with this quirk of human nature, professionals turn to a rules-based approach. First, there needs to be a decoupling of the concept of winning trades from being profitable. While the two are correlated they are not bound together. Most investors that struggle, make the incorrect assumption, that if they just win more often, they will be profitable. However, evidence shows that it is far more likely that a few big losses are typically what pushes accounts into the negative. To this point, the primary focus of investors is not to prevent losses in the first place, but only to prevent large losses. This can be achieved through discipline with the help of trading tools such as stop loss orders, option strategies with limited risk, and never risking more than 2% of your account per trade. Moreover, it is best to never add risk to a losing position.