Why Beginners Lose Money Even in an Uptrend

18 Eyl 2020

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In this post, i'll be focusing on the psychology aspect of trading and investing that most people overlook.
Contrary to common belief, in my personal opinion, understanding a trader and investor's own psychology is significantly more important than educating oneself on trading techniques and learning how to read financials.

'Buy low sell high' is the motto. As simple as it sounds, why do most people lose money trading or investing?

There are four major mistakes that most beginners make:
1. Excessive Confidence
This stems from the idea that people think of themselves as special. They think they can 'crack the code' in the stock market that 99.9% of people fail to, and eventually make a living trading and investing. However, taking into consideration the fact that more people lose money in the market, this form of wishful thinking is the same mentality as going into a casino feeling lucky. You may actually get lucky and win big the first few times, but in the end, the house always wins.

2. Distorted Judgements
While simplicity is key, the approach most beginners make in trading and investing are too simplistic, to the extend where it's hard to even call it a trading logic or reason to invest. They spot a few reoccurring patterns within the market, and this is almost as if they discovered fire. It doesn't take long to realize that the "pattern" they spotted was never based on any solid reasoning, or worse, wasn't even a pattern at all in the first place.

3. Herding Behavior
The fundamentals of this is also deeply rooted in a gambling mindset. Beginners are attracted to the idea of a single trade or investment that will make them a millionaire. However, they fail to realize that there is no such thing. Trading and investing is nothing like winning the lottery. It's about making consistent profits that compound throughout time. While people should definitely look for assets that have high liquidity and some volatility , the get-rich-quick mentality drags irrational beginners into overextended/overbought stocks that eventually drop drastically.

4. Risk Aversion
Risk aversion is a psychological trait embedded within all of mankind's DNA. Winning is fun, but we can't tolerate losing. We tend to avoid risk, even when the potential reward is worth pursuing. As such, many beginners take extremely small amounts of profits, in fear that they might close their position at a loss, trading with a terrible risk reward ratio. In the long run, their willingness to not take any risks leads to losses.

Depending on the price action, they also go through seven phases of psychological stages:
- Anxiety
- Interest
- Confidence
- Greed
- Doubt
- Concern
- Regret

As we can see in the chart for the S&P500 (SPX) , there are price points at which beginners would buy during their 'confidence' phase, and sell during their 'concern' phase.
As a result, they would be losing money even when the market moves in an upward trend.

Even when the market is at a clear uptrend, it goes through phases of impulse moves, and corrective moves.
However, as beginners are swayed away by their emotions, they fail to recognize the overall trend, resulting in them buying high and selling low.

Conclusion
The most important thing that beginners need to realize before they start trading or investing is that human beings are emotional beings, and as a result, they are not different from the rest of the people in the market. All successful traders and investors throughout history have had superb meta-cognition. They understand their own psychology, as well as that of other participants in the market, allowing them to make rational decisions with patience, rather than hasty decisions based on emotions.