From buying far out-of-the-money options to averaging losers — the errors that repeat in almost every early journal.
Key takeaways
- Cheap options are cheap for a reason: the market expects them to expire worthless.
- Averaging into losers converts a small planned loss into an unplanned large one.
- Most first-year damage is caused by size, not by strategy selection.
One: buying far out-of-the-money options because they cost ₹4. Two: averaging down without a pre-planned scale-in. Three: sizing by conviction instead of a fixed risk unit. Four: trading five instruments in one session.
Five: moving a stop because the level 'clearly' has to hold. Six: taking profits at 0.5R while letting losses run to 2R. Seven: trading news events without understanding volatility crush. Eight: mistaking a bull market for skill.
Nine: no journal, therefore no evidence, therefore no improvement. Ten: switching strategies weekly, which guarantees no sample is ever large enough to evaluate. Eleven: ignoring costs on a high-frequency approach.
Twelve, and most expensive: trading capital that is needed for something else. Money with a deadline forces bad decisions, and no technique compensates for that pressure.
Notice that most of these are risk and process errors. That is the point — first-year survival is almost entirely a function of size discipline, not analytical brilliance.
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