If you ask almost everyone who’s traded for any decent period of time, some of the worst concentrated short-term losses usually come from trying to chase what your account was worth before. At some point, the whole point of this game is making sure your losses are limited while also trying to win. If you switch focus from this primary goal to trying to chase a particular high, net worth all-time high (ATH), it gets really drastic and gloomy really fast.

The scenario goes like this: you’ve grown your portfolio to $50k in value, and on the day it’s currently up to $58k, +$8k on your new trade. For some reason, it reverses to a -$700 loss, so you’re down to $49,300. You think, "Why not look for something else to run it back up to $58k again, and then I’ll close for the day?" You open that impulsive gambling black hole and then take one trade for $1,700, another one for +$1k, and another for +$600 before hitting -$1,400. Now you’re fully gambling on what’s next. All of a sudden, a couple of back-to-back losses from scalps bring it down to $43,000, and now you’re trying to get back to $50k. So you take a rest, and it goes and goes and goes. By evening, it’s at $31k, and you’re sweating, paranoid, and have done nothing all day, full of anxiety, trying to wonder what went wrong while also looking for one holy grail setup to bet heavily on and get your money back. You see something, hit it, and maybe another -$5k. You quickly exit, and it reverses, and so on. You’ll probably be lucky to end the day at $11,000; some people end up at $0… this is real life. There’s no deadline; unless you die, you’ll wake up every day to trade. Any day you treat it like do or die, you’ll do, and no single person will care except a couple of random accounts on Twitter who’ll reply, "You’ll make it back, bro, don’t worry."