Trading · 67 / 86 · 2 min

Size, stops, and the journal

Size is a number you write before the story gets good. A stop is an exit you wrote before. Hope is moving that exit because the price disagreed.

A worked case

A person writes a stop, then moves it when the price disagrees, then deletes the line from the journal. Later they remember the idea and not the move. The journal, if they had left it, would have shown the hope.

The number

Write the most you can lose on this idea, in money, before you look for a clever entry. The school does not pick that number. Adding more because the chart looks better is the habit to refuse.

Ten lines

What you believed. What you did. The size. The fees. What would prove you wrong. Memory flatters you later. The page does not.

A stop you move further away is no longer a stop. It is hope.

The line they moved, and then forgot

A journal is how you stop your memory from editing the trade. Professionals in every market write the size, the exit, and what would prove them wrong before they click, because afterwards the story improves. Crypto social media does the opposite: the wins are screenshots, the stops that were moved are not in the picture, and the fees are cropped out.

The 2022 funds that blew up were not short of confidence or of spreadsheets. Several were short of a stop they were willing to keep. Three Arrows is the public name. The private version is a person who moves a liquidation-adjacent stop once, then again, and later remembers the original idea. The exchange remembers the liquidation.

Write the size in money, not in courage. A stop you move further away is hope. Hope is allowed. It is not a plan, and it should not be written down afterwards as if it had been.

Read it yourself

• Three Arrows Capital
• FCA consumer research, on advice from social media

These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.

Apply the check

Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.

Check yourself