You are not the only one
On 10 November I was a guest at the Momentum Futures Club, a trading community for day traders, and gave a talk there on trading rules. That evening it struck me how much a community like this is worth.
As a trader you spend most of your time alone at home in front of your computer. You think you are the only one with certain challenges and problems. You are not. As a coach I see it again and again: almost every trader runs into the same issues sooner or later. That is why it is good to have a shared place where you feel understood and can talk things through.
I do not want to pretend that every group is good for you, though. In one large study, a typical trading mistake became almost twice as strong once traders could see each other's positions in a network. At the end of this article you will find an exercise that needs only one partner.
What is in this article
- You learn more slowly on your own
- When the group makes you worse
- In the evening, what counts is whether you kept your rules
- Sharing strategies costs you nothing
- How to recognise a good trading community
- An accountability buddy for your rules
You learn more slowly on your own
Brett Steenbarger coached traders at trading firms for many years. In his book The Daily Trading Coach he calls working on your trading in isolation one of the biggest mistakes you can make. He also explains why it is so easy to stay alone: all you need for the most liquid markets in the world is a computer and an internet connection at home.
At the trading firms he saw how much faster traders learn when other people are around them. They pick up how someone climbs back out of a drawdown, and they get honest feedback on their ideas. Social learning, he writes, multiplies experience and shortens learning curves.
In my article on trading rules I wrote that nobody comes round to check whether you stick to your rules. A community does not change that, you still have to set your rules yourself. But it makes a difference whether you are the only one asking in the evening how the day went. On your own, you can almost always find a good reason why today was an exception.
When the group makes you worse
The finance researcher Rawley Heimer looked at a platform where forex traders could connect with each other. Traders who were friends there could see in real time which positions the others had open. The platform gradually partnered with different brokers, which let Heimer compare the same traders before and after they joined, more than 5,000 of them in total.
With the network, a well-known mistake became almost twice as strong: winners were closed too early and losers were held too long. Researchers call this the disposition effect. Heimer explains it with the wish to look good in front of others. A profit is something you can show, and a loss you have not closed is one you do not have to explain to anybody yet.
Anyone who posts their trades in a chat faces exactly this temptation. You take the profit quickly so that it makes the screenshot, and you leave the loss open for as long as nobody can see it.
In the evening, what counts is whether you kept your rules
In 1992 Itamar Simonson and Barry Staw had business students work through a case from practice. They had to decide which of two products should get extra marketing money. Afterwards the chosen product disappointed. In a second round the question was how much of a further ten million dollars they would still put into their first choice.
What made a difference was what the students had been told beforehand. One group knew they would be judged on the outcome. The other group knew they would be judged on how they made their decision. The first group put an average of 5.8 million into the weak product, the second 4.0 million.
These were students, and it was not their own money. Still, many traders know the pattern of adding to a position that has long been running against them, because closing it would mean admitting they were wrong. One more thing helped in the same experiment, namely a minimum target set in advance, with a clear understanding that missing it would mean changing course. In trading that would be a daily loss limit that is fixed before the first trade.
In both studies a lot depended on whether the others were looking at the outcome or at the decision. In a good community, someone asks you in the evening whether you kept your rules. What the day made says little on its own, because you can also win by luck. If you keep your rules and still make no money for weeks, the problem lies in the strategy or in the knowledge behind it, and that is where you start.
Sharing strategies costs you nothing
In some communities I come across a reluctance to share strategies. I would still encourage it. However good a strategy is, it only becomes good once you apply it and test it. I could give you the best business idea in the world, one that makes Amazon look pale. It is worth nothing if you do not put it into practice. Trading strategies are similar. They rarely get stolen, because everyone would first have to adapt them, learn them and make them their own.
Steenbarger suggests something similar and calls it virtual trading groups. Everyone trades their own money, but ideas are shared openly and people help each other. Even one or two like-minded traders are an important step for him. Because you value these people and do not want to let them down, he writes, you are more likely to stick to your preparation and your goals.
How to recognise a good trading community
What I would look for before investing time and money anywhere:
- Losses are talked about as openly as profits. Steenbarger advises looking for exactly this kind of group.
- Someone asks about your rules, not only about your result.
- There are no signals to copy. If you copy other people's entries, you do not learn rules of your own.
- A day without a trade counts as a decision there.
- There are fixed times to look back at the last few days together, in addition to the chat.
The MFC's homepage, which is in German, has a sentence I would like to see in many trading groups. Translated, it says: "Losing streaks are part of trading. At the MFC you talk about them openly instead of pushing them away." There are explicitly no signals to copy there.
An accountability buddy for your rules
You do not need a big group to start. Steenbarger recommends beginning with a single trader who trades similar markets and timeframes to yours. That person is your accountability buddy: someone you tell beforehand what you intend to do, and who asks afterwards how it went.
Before your first trade, you send them three lines:
My risk per trade today, in percent:
This is where I stop today, by daily loss, losses in a row or time of day:
This is how I recognise my entry signal:
Your buddy only checks whether every line has a clear answer. If it says "roughly", they ask again until there is a number or a sentence that can be checked with yes or no in the evening. The second line is the one that matters on bad days. What goes on in your head in a session like that is described in Revenge trading: catching the moment emotion takes over.
After the session you write back with yes or no for each line, depending on whether you stuck to it. For every no, add one sentence on what happened right before. Silence counts as a no, and your buddy asks at the agreed time without waiting for you.
There are two things your buddy does not do. They do not ask about your account balance, and they do not give you tips on your trades during the session. They just look and tell you what they see, and you do the same for them.
My accountability buddy:
We message each other before and after .
We start on and keep it up for two weeks.
If you are part of a community, simply ask who wants to join in. And if one of the lines only comes out as "roughly" when you fill it in, start right there. How to find a clear answer for every line is what I show in How to build a trading plan: the rules you need before your first trade. Looking back in the evening is the part of the trading day most traders skip. Where it belongs in your day is described in Trading psychology: the four phases of your trading day.
How I work with this
In coaching, for a while I am the person who asks about your rules in the evening. We look at the days with a no together and work out what happened right before. From that we build rules you can later check with a buddy or in your community.
The first step is a short, non-binding intro call.
About the author
Angelika Behling is a performance coach for traders. More than eleven years of coaching experience and over 410 traders and teams supported. Contact and booking at coachfortraders.com.
Sources
- Heimer, R. Z. (2016). Peer Pressure: Social Interaction and the Disposition Effect. The Review of Financial Studies, 29(11), 3177–3209. (Data from the myForexBook platform, more than 5,000 traders; access to the network almost doubles the disposition effect)
- Simonson, I. & Staw, B. M. (1992). Deescalation Strategies: A Comparison of Techniques for Reducing Commitment to Losing Courses of Action. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), 419–426. (Case study with business students, about 30 per condition; on average 5.8 million went to the first choice under outcome accountability and 4.0 million under process accountability)
- Steenbarger, B. N. (2009). The Daily Trading Coach, Lesson 46: Find Positive Trading Relationships, and Lesson 63: Harness the Power of Social Learning.
- Momentum Futures Club, homepage momentumfuturesclub.eu (in German), accessed 11 November 2026.