You're Defining Winning Wrong. It's Costing You.
🟣 Tradetopia Field Notes — Issue #42 — March 23, 2026
When I first started trading, the goal every single week was to turn a couple hundred dollars into a thousand. That was it. That was winning. Anything below that was a failure.
I didn't know what risk management was. I didn't know what responsible risk even looked like. The people around me didn't either, so nobody was telling me any different. I just chased profits. Every week, same goal, same chase.
My charts actually started looking decent. I was reading price. I was seeing setups. But my account didn't reflect any of it. There was this disconnect I couldn't explain for a long time.
It wasn't until I started questioning the root of my decisions that things started to make sense. Why was I really getting in? Why was I holding past my plan? Why did a red day feel like I failed as a person?
I had to basically reset everything I thought I knew. I stopped setting daily outcome expectations. Risk became consistent. And slowly, things started to compound.
That's when I realized the problem was never my charts. It was how I was defining winning.
The Lie Most Traders Are Living
Most traders think winning means green day. Made money. High win rate. Caught the whole move. The money printer sound. The dopamine hit. That's the feedback loop we're all chasing.
And that loop will destroy you. Because when you wire your brain to reward green trades and punish red ones, you start making decisions that serve the emotion, not the edge. You move stops because it worked that one time. You get in without a real plan and it goes your way, so now your brain files that away as a good trade. You get a payout, the ego inflates, and you just keep duplicating whatever got you there, even if what got you there was mostly luck.
Trading is probabilities played out over dozens and dozens of trades. One outcome tells you almost nothing. But if you're letting one outcome dictate how you feel about yourself as a trader, you're basing long term habits on the smallest possible sample size.
False Winning vs. False Failure
What it looks like | What it actually means | |
|---|---|---|
False winning | Overleveraged, no real plan, moved your stop, came out green | Bad process. Your dopamine doesn't know the difference. You have to. |
False failure | A+ setup, correct sizing, every confirmation, followed every rule, got stopped out | Good trading. The system worked exactly as it should. |
Win to your system. Lose to your system. Stop winning and losing to wherever your emotions are that day.
What Winning Actually Looks Like
It's not a number. It's a set of behaviors executed consistently over time. Here's how to start reframing it:
Feel good because you followed your system, not because the P&L was positive
Journal red trades without punishment : if you did everything right, that's a win
Stop measuring yourself trade by trade : the story lives in the data over dozens of trades
Build the sample size : that's what actually tells you whether your edge is real
A green trading day doesn't always mean good trading. A red trading day doesn't always mean bad trading. That identity shift is what compounds. Short term results are not long term habits. Don't let them become one.
If your definition of winning doesn't evolve, you won't either.
Full breakdown in this week's video. Everything above, plus more.
I went deeper on all of this in this week's video.
Watch it here: Why Most Traders Get Winning Totally Wrong
And if you want to see it play out in real time, we're live Monday through Friday: Free live streams
Join the free community: tradingwithmike.com
Filed: March 23, 2026 | Location: Behind the Screens — Chicago 🇺🇸
