Why Can't You Ever Make Money? The Key to Escaping the Retail Investor's Slaughterhouse Revealed! Experts: Quit This Investment Habit First

Editor’s Note: Have you ever wondered why some people navigate the markets with ease, while most investors struggle amid emotional and informational chaos? Behavioral psychologist Charles Faulkner offers a surprisingly deep insight into this dilemma. He shows traders that losses are not marks of failure, but essential nutrients for skill development. The book 'Trading in the Zone' guides us through the fog, redefining the meaning of money from a broader perspective. When you can view the big picture from 35,000 feet while focusing on the details of each decision, you’ve reached the starting point of profitable trend trading. True victory begins with psychological awakening.

You may have heard the phrase 'live in the moment.' It means the past is gone, the future is unknown, and the only thing you can truly grasp is the present. This doesn’t mean we can’t learn from past experiences or mistakes, nor does it mean we shouldn’t prepare for the future. What I mean is that decisions should be based on what is actually happening right now. Great trend traders plan their lives and build wealth based on the present moment.

Although Charles Faulkner (Charles Faulkner) isn’t a trader himself, he provides extremely valuable insights. Over the years, I can’t think of anyone else who has helped traders and investors understand themselves more deeply. For traders, 'understanding yourself' is an essential step on the path to profitable trend trading.

Faulkner views the world from a remarkably broad and novel perspective—and you should too.

Take this powerful example: we all must learn a crucial lesson—once you enter the market game, losses are part of it. No matter how experienced you are, losses are inevitable. This means we must ensure our losses are within our capacity to handle—and recognize that losses will affect your emotions.

Athletes understand this well. Professional athletes know that to improve their skills, they must learn from failure. That’s why they seek to compete against stronger opponents—because only then can they truly become stronger.

We can also study traders, as trading is a highly specialized profession, so traders pay intense attention to every detail. Things that might take months or years to clarify in daily life can be understood much faster by traders. For instance, most people spend the most money on buying homes or cars, but successful trend traders may handle equivalent amounts of money in just one hour—or even minutes.

This means when trading, you shouldn’t treat money like you do when buying a car. Instead, treat money like a score. Developing this mindset is crucial. The most important first step is to stop viewing money through the lens of shopping and start seeing it as points in a game.

Critically observe how the world operates. If you’re looking out from 35,000 feet and say, 'OK, I’m looking out the window and I know what’s happening down there,' you actually don’t know. You must seriously think for yourself about what’s happening right now.

Accepting Opinions

We don’t like accepting opinions, yet we do it frequently. Accepting opinions means giving leadership to others. Emotionally, it means stepping back. What do others know that you don’t?

Financially, accepting opinions means handing over your wealth to someone else. Intellectually, it means admitting you’re less smart and less responsible, because you’re entrusting your money to someone else.

In a sense, it’s perfectly normal to accept the advice of someone skilled in a particular field. We all learned to drive from parents, relatives, or driving instructors. We follow sports coaches’ guidance to learn a sport, as they unlock our potential, and then we seek others who can help us refine our skills.

From this perspective, accepting financial advice makes perfect sense. You know there are things you don’t know, and when you realize that, you naturally ask: 'Who knows then?'

But this is where things get strange. In professional baseball or other sports, we can clearly see whether an athlete performs well or poorly. Since sports are tangible activities, we can observe talent, and statistics prove ability. We learn from them because they know the secrets of the sport.

The same logic applies to financial advice, but unfortunately, someone who profited last quarter may have simply been lucky. Many people lack real skill—they were just fortunate.

Accepting opinions is a dilemma. If you don’t understand something, how do you pick someone who truly knows? Many say, 'He made money last year, so I should listen to him.' Again, in non-financial areas, this is reasonable. If someone is great at cooking or filmmaking, it makes sense to hire them next year. Learning cooking from world-renowned chef Wolfgang Puck or filmmaking from director Steven Spielberg is a great choice.

This is the challenge. How do you judge someone’s promise of guaranteed profits? How do you decide if they’re someone whose advice you should accept? If someone repairs cars, after watching them fix a few, you might say, 'I can trust their skills.'

The people we seek are those with knowledge in a specific area. But who truly understands the mysteries of money and finance? Who really knows about money and finance? Is it someone who can create actuarial tables? Someone skilled in compound interest? Does understanding compound interest mean you understand money? Because people desire positive outcomes and money affects emotions, this becomes a particularly difficult issue.

Take chess as an analogy. The key is how you play—those who truly understand the game win more often and stay ahead longer. Winning by luck is extremely rare. You wouldn’t want advice from someone who won only a few games; you’d want to learn from someone who truly understands the process of playing.

Therefore, when seeking financial advice, we must not only listen to their results but also understand how they achieved them. Is their profit-making process valuable? Does it allow for mistakes? Does it help them improve over time?

As a trend trader, you must think psychologically about victory.

Money Is Responsibility

Money is responsibility; money is the currency of life. For those who don’t want to take responsibility for money, it’s like saying, 'I take no responsibility for my own time or how I use it.' Their lives operate in reactive mode—instead of planning a fulfilling life, they merely react to stimuli. Such a life is no different from wild animals, who only react to events affecting basic needs (fight or flight). For humans, such a life is neither happy nor satisfying.

We must define our strengths—our 'self-directed' position—where we actively and directly participate in our decisions about time, money, and other meaningful matters.

The difficulty is that today’s media culture promotes instant gratification. We rarely discuss, reflect, or think about how to wisely or intelligently save, invest, or grow our assets.

In fact, media spreads contradictory messages, so it’s no wonder people find financial independence increasingly difficult.

Financial independence is no longer in vogue in society. Although rationalism and traditional religions once promoted financial independence to teach long-term vision and better decision-making, now it’s seen as the responsibility of financial advisors (worse, today’s financial media constantly emphasizes that we must achieve financial independence 24/7).

For example, someone might spend 17 hours a day watching TV—perhaps you do too. The content you watch becomes your memory, replacing memories of time with your children, walking in the forest, trading in front of a screen, or planning your future with your partner. In the end, you’ll only remember digital images from media and reality TV content.

This is truly sad. Many people, after watching the movie 'Wall Street,' mistakenly saw Gordon Gekko—created by screenwriter Oliver Stone—as a role model and decided to enter Wall Street. More people entered Wall Street because of Gekko than because of Warren Buffett, commodities king Jim Rogers, or other renowned investors’ track records. The media’s influence on us is truly immense.

Why am I saying this? Because even if you can foresee the future, you’re already satisfied with the present. In sports, the difference between amateur and professional athletes is that the latter aren’t satisfied with merely participating and losing. Professional athletes find satisfaction even when they lose