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If you’ve ever sat at your screen bird-dogging a position, you know the feeling I’m about to describe…
Every tick feels like life or death. You catch yourself thinking, is it going to close here or there? Am I going to make money or lose money?
Your entire emotional state hangs on a single chart. When all your time and energy compress into one trade, the stress doesn’t just creep up — it compounds. And if you stay on that path long enough, it works its way into your body.
A few years after I left PIMCO, a headhunter called me about a seat at Wells Fargo. I wasn’t looking to get back into managing money but I took the interview anyway.
When I arrived, I found out why the role was open. The trader who held it had died of a heart attack. He was 34, had three children — ages 2, 3 and 4. The stress of his positions helped kill him.
This is the real danger behind needing one trade to save you. It’s not just a bad strategy — it’s a threat to your health. And the root of that stress is the belief that you can control what happens next.
But you can’t. No one can.
We have zero control over where the market will go, and the moment you slip into hoping or praying or trying to force a prediction, you’re already lost.
If you have more than one position on, you’re not just trading — you’re actually managing a portfolio. Most people have never been taught how to do that, and the gap between what they’re doing and what they understand creates enormous psychological pressure.
When 1 Trade Controls Everything
The truth is that no individual outcome matters. Professionals don’t obsess over the next win or the next loss because each one is just a single entry in a long sequence that plays out over hundreds of trades. The moment you fixate on one, you disconnect from the process that actually drives results.
Many traders carry unrealistic expectations — returns they’ve seen others post and assume they should match. But what’s attainable for you depends on your current skills, your experience and your ability to judge risk.
If you can’t answer that yet, good. It means you’re still early in the learning curve and recognizing that is the first step toward building something real.
The Only Way Out
If you find yourself clinging to one position, you need to rebuild your approach from the ground up. That means learning how to size correctly, how to diversify exposure and how to construct your account so no single trade can hurt you.
The skill of managing your portfolio is learnable and once you have it, the stress moves off your shoulders and into the structure of your system where it belongs.
There’s no shame in being a beginner here. In fact, accepting that you are is a sign of maturity. It opens the door to absorbing the principles and habits that will let you trade without fear.
And here’s the good news. Retail traders have advantages professionals don’t — flexibility, speed and the freedom to choose when and how to participate. Once you stop letting the market control you and start managing your portfolio with intention, those advantages become powerful.
Kane Shieh
Kane Shieh Trading
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*This is for informational and educational purposes only. There is inherent risk in trading, so trade at your own risk.
P.S. Have You Heard About This Loophole In The Options Market?
I recently shared a “mistake” in the options market…
It gives us an insane edge in finding stocks about to break out!
