There Is No Next Trade...And That’s the Point What you do after the win is what decides if you keep any of it. After my last post (The HYPE one that caught some fire) the replies flooded in. Comment after comment, message after message, all circling the same question: “So what’s the next trade?” I owe it to everyone asking to be honest: there isn’t one. Not right now. And frankly, there might not be for a while. That might sound excessive. Overwrought, even. From the outside, it was just a clean win. One trade. Nothing more. The trade itself is never the lesson. What comes after is what actually determines who wins long-term. You can sprint into the next trade if you want. You can chase the next shot of adrenaline. But more often than not, it won’t end with another win. It’ll end with you, sitting in silence, wondering how you gave it all back. I speak from experience, in trading and in life. After a big win, you want to jump back in and ride the wave, but what you often get is the brutal reset. You get punished, sometimes harshly, for impatience, for overconfidence, for disrespecting the delicate balance of momentum and risk. When you win, your ego floods your mind like a wildfire. It whispers that you are somehow special, an exception to the rule. It tells you that what you touch turns to gold, that you’re the outlier who just cracked the code. Your ego craves the applause, and it’s terrified of silence. So it insists there must be a “next,” immediately, because without praise, it cannot breathe. This voice distorts your perception, making success seem inevitable, almost a default state, when in reality, the default is the grind: the long, patient, invisible work. Then there’s money...the second silent saboteur. Suddenly, you hold what once felt scarce in your hands. The scarcity that sharpened your focus, that forced discipline, evaporates. When abundance appears without warning, it invites carelessness. You start to see money as dispensable, not precious. The irony is brutal: the moment money feels like it’s no longer valuable is precisely when it’s most vulnerable to vanishing. Money is a wild animal; respect it, or it will run away. But perhaps the most dangerous trap is forgetting mastery. When you win, it’s tempting to erase the memory of all the mistakes, the countless bad calls, the time spent second-guessing, the grind beneath the spotlight. The struggle fades into the background, replaced by the dazzling prize. And when the struggle becomes invisible, you become comfortable, reckless even, believing that winning no longer demands effort or sacrifice. This is a lie. Mastery is a fragile, ongoing process that does not pause to celebrate; it demands constant respect, humility, and recalibration. On top of all this sits survivorship bias... The quiet distortion that comes from seeing only winners, only success stories, and forgetting the thousands who fail in silence. When the narrative around you is all about the rare big wins, it warps your understanding of reality. It convinces you that the odds are better than they are, that the next jackpot is just a step away. Ego and survivorship bias make a dangerous duet, convincing you of inevitability when success is anything but guaranteed. And finally, there is rest. Something I’ve only recently learned to cherish after big wins. We tend to rush from one goal to the next, never stopping to fully acknowledge what we’ve achieved. We replace the richness of the journey with a hollow tally of outcomes. Taking a break is not weakness, it is essential. It is the time when you rebuild your equilibrium, when you digest the victory with a clear mind, when you strip away the illusions and see your win in its full complexity. In that moment of reflection, humility is born. You recognize the luck, the mistakes that nearly cost you, the fragile line you walked. This kind of analysis humbles you, and that humility is the foundation of all future wins. So there is no next trade. Not yet. The pause is the invitation to step out of the noise, to let your ego rest, to respect money again, to remember the struggle beneath the win, to see the cycle, and most importantly, to rest. Because the market, and life, will still be there when you’re ready.