I've been bleeding by a lot of papercuts on several trades lately.. I am getting frightened by it in a lot of ways and just wish I had a proper way to navigate through this and still gain the experience necessary to effectively learn how I can make this a career.

I'm getting numb to losing and growing a fear of winning. It would be an encouraging thing to win, right? Well, the fear of it is I would allow it to emotionally impact me in a positive way and then if I lose again and again.. I would be vulnerable and not as adaptive to the pain that has subsided through this drawdown.

But this would mean I am experiencing self-sabotage in a way too. If I am in a drawdown, am I achieving the goal I have set out to do? Well, that would imply I am protecting something that's worth keeping to achieve my end goal. What are those things I am protecting, specifically?

I don't only want to acknowledge it's okay to lose, but I want to be okay with losing because I know it is a part of the process whether I am consistently profitable or not through my entire trading journey. When I lose, I like the practice of managing my risk and cutting my losses quickly or refining when and where I need to cut my position and move onto the next trade with a clear head.

The practice of managing risk would be okay if that was the goal I have set out to do. It's a part of what it takes to achieve the goal, but not the goal. I am not going out of my way to lose and manage how well I have lost. I truly want to win the stocks I enter and most of the time, it goes against me. Maybe I'll find points in lines I can enter and exit if I were scalping, but I don't know if I would have good enough r/r if I aim for less volatile points unless I nail a great entry. I am setting out to pull the trigger on great r/r setups that I can see myself holding until a good target area, but it doesn't do that and I respect price action is king.

If I start paper trading a lot or something similar that would deviate my current approach, I am afraid I would not be able to pull the trigger later. So maybe this market tuition is more worth investing than what I would be making up for later if I tried something else. I know it takes time, but I don't want to waste time doing something that may not work. The question is, “is it worth the amount I am losing in this drawdown?” I know I am doing a part of what I need to do to be effective later on, but I don’t know how significant this part is in exchange for the tuition. I need some sort of shift from what I am currently doing, but don’t know what or how much would be worthwhile.

I guess a part of me is insane, because I am repeating the same mistakes in some ways. However, I need a convincing alternative to set a different approach in motion. One thing I know is that I really want to figure things out—to recognize when and know I can seize the moment of opportunity and find peace in narrowing my focus on things that can grow my account. What keeps me from that?

I think a lot of it is not knowing how to scan for stocks each night to know what to look for the next day. I usually go through a few hundred stocks and see which of them might be worth keeping an eye on the following day. What I really may need to do is beyond me, I think. I don’t know who can help me with TOS scans and am certainly not smart enough to put everything together into code for the specific criteria I would gather from other plays for a particular setup. There could be basic things to gather each day, but the opportunity cost of giving time to that instead of my nightly scans makes me feel like I would lose the small things that are growing into me the results that haven’t yet shown. I like to keep a pulse on the market and get a feel for the frequency of setups that occur from a variety to certain environments.

I don’t know what to trust to develop my future trading self in the most efficient way, but I know I want to keep learning and grow into a consistently profitable trader.