Trading after a losing week

A losing week is not a signal. It is weather.

The problem is that it does not feel like weather. It feels like evidence — that the plan is broken, that you have lost your read, that something needs to change right now. And so Monday arrives and the trader who spent three months building a process quietly abandons it inside twenty minutes.

What actually goes wrong

Two things, usually. Size creeps up, because a bigger win would settle the account faster. And patience drops, because sitting on your hands feels unbearable when you are behind. Both of them convert a normal drawdown into a real one.

Notice that neither has anything to do with the market. The setups did not get worse. You did.

A protocol beats willpower

Decide, in advance and in writing, what happens after a losing week:

1. 01Size stays where it is, or halves. It never goes up.
2. 02Review the losing trades against the plan. The only question is "did I follow it?" — not "was I right?" A losing trade taken correctly is a good trade.
3. 03If more than one loss came from breaking the plan, take a day off the charts. The problem is not the market.
4. 04Trade the next week normally.

Written down, that is trivial. Executed on the Monday after a red week, it is the hardest thing in the job.

Losses you planned for are just costs

The account does not know whether a loss came from a bad week or a good one. It only knows the number. If you sized it so that a run of them is survivable, then the run is a cost of doing business — the same as spread, the same as commission.

The losses that end accounts are almost never the planned ones.