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 a single trade that a normal losing streak becomes unrecoverable. The rule that fixes it is boring: set the maximum loss per trade before you open 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 owes you no bounce. The practical fix is a cooling-off period: after a hard stop, the platform stays closed for the rest of the day. Automated strategies have an edge here: they do not feel insulted by a red number.
The third is ignoring costs: commissions and spreads are certain; profits are not. A strategy that trades twice as often pays twice the costs for perhaps the same gross return. Review net performance, not gross. And the fourth: mistaking a bull market for talent. In a rising market almost every buy looks brilliant; the size that felt right then fails exactly when the trend turns.
Manual trading versus automated trading
Manual trading means you decide every entry and every exit. Its strength is adaptability: you can read context, skip a trade that "looks odd" and react to news no model saw. Its weakness is consistency: you get tired, bored, euphoric and frightened, sometimes within a single afternoon, and every emotion wants to edit the plan.
Automated trading executes fixed rules without sentiment. Its strength is discipline at 3 a.m. and its speed of reaction; its weakness is literalness: a rule is followed to the letter, even when the market has changed character and the rule no longer makes sense. That is why automated does not mean unattended: someone still decides which rules run, with which limits, and for how long.
In practice the two complement each other. 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 deciding factor is the same: the quality of the plan and the honesty to follow it.
The psychology of the trader
Trading psychology is not about staying calm: it is about arranging your trading so that being uncomfortable cannot hurt you. The emotions that ruin accounts are fear (closing winners too early, doubting planned entries) and greed (oversizing, stretching past your planned exit). Both answer the same underlying question: "what if I miss it?". The professional answer: you will miss things, constantly, and that costs less than forcing them.
Three practices work. First, write the plan before the session (asset, entry condition, size, exit, invalidation) and treat in-session edits as forbidden. Second, log every trade on one line: reason, result, emotion. Patterns emerge within weeks, and they are usually emotional patterns, not analytical ones. Third, define your day as finished in advance: a daily loss limit and a stop after reaching your target cut off the worst trading hours, the ones that follow strong emotions.
Automation helps precisely because it externalises discipline: the rules you wrote on a calm evening get executed on a wild Tuesday. But the psychology does not disappear: it moves up a level, to choosing and sizing strategies, and to letting them work long enough. That is the real skill this platform asks of you: decide well once, and let the system be systematic.