Why do people say they are "winning in stocks" when they are losing in FX?
I dislike him.
I hate him a lot.
He is a miserable human being.
No, as a human he might be a good person… perhaps.
However, as a trader he is the worst.
He succeeds in business and has far more assets than I do.
He even has billions in FX margins.
It’s enviable.
It makes me angry.
His FX method is really straightforward.
He enters when he thinks there’s a chance.
If it becomes unrealized profit, he realises it immediately.
If it becomes unrealized loss, he endures.
He endures to the very end.
With a huge amount of margin backing him, he endures until it turns to profit.
The concept of stop loss hardly exists.
“It will bounce back eventually.”
This is his main rationale.
And indeed, there are times when it does bounce back.
An unrealized loss of 1 million yen.
2 million yen.
3 million yen.
Even if the numbers would normally make one’s stomach turn sour, he endures.
“Well, it’ll come back.”
A few days later.
It actually comes back.
The unrealized losses disappear.
It becomes slightly profitable.
Then he immediately realises the profit.
“See?”
He says it triumphantly.
“In the end, if you wait, it comes back.”
I think.
No.
This time it merely came back.
But inside him,
“I endured it.”
is not what it is.
It has become,
“I anticipated it fully.”
This is troublesome.
He has margins of hundreds of millions of yen.
Therefore, even when normally one would be forced to cut losses, he can endure.
No.
To be precise,
he can be endured.
Moreover, he has a track record of surviving even after carrying unrealized losses of tens of millions of yen in the past,
and coming out alive from there.
He endured losses that great.
Still, in the end, he was saved.
For him, that must have been a powerful success experience.
But I think.
That wasn’t a success experience so much as a bad one.
Even if the unrealized loss becomes even larger,
the memory of “it bounced back before” distances him from cutting losses.
The experience of surviving a loss of tens of millions of yen becomes the reason he endures the next loss of tens of millions of yen.
And if it bounces back again,
“See. If you wait, it will bounce back.”
Then it becomes so.
The bad success experience grows stronger.
And, more troublesome is stock.
Even while unrealized losses in FX keep increasing,
he is making a little profit in stocks.
Stocks go up.
Profits accrue.
Dividends come in.
Then he says,
“See, I’m winning in stocks.”
Meanwhile, FX unrealized losses keep growing.
10 million yen.
20 million yen.
30 million yen.
Still, he’s profitable in stocks.
Probably this is bad for him as well.
If you look at FX, clearly something is wrong.
However, as stock profits trickle in,
he can maintain the sense that
“I am not wrong.”
He loses in FX,
but wins in stocks.
Therefore, he thinks he isn’t bad at investing.
That’s what he thinks.
Even if he won 500,000 yen in stocks,
it doesn’t justify a 30,000,000 yen unrealized loss in FX.
Moreover, it doesn’t make the decision not to cut losses in FX correct.
But for him, a small success in stocks makes the big FX failure harder to see.
In the past, he survived unrealized losses of tens of millions.
Even now, he’s making a profit in stocks.
So, it feels like he’s still okay.
That’s probably why he thinks so.
He likes to treat others.
If you go out to a meal, he always pays.
He’s a good guy.
Since I always let him pay, I say once in a while, “Okay. I’ll pay today.”
Then he laughs and says,
“No, no. The bill here is peanuts compared to FX losses.”
He even reveals self-deprecation jokes.
His heart is generous.
I got carried away.
“Then, treat him and cut losses in FX.”
In that moment, his expression changed.
The generous man from a moment ago vanished somewhere.
The shitty person emerged.
“Someday you’ll be saved, and that’s good enough!”
And he continues.
“And you’re winning in stocks too!”
There he goes.
Stock again.
While saying he’s winning in stocks, his main battlefield is FX.
Clearly, he spends more time looking at FX charts.
Stocks: you buy when it goes down.
But in FX, when you think “it’s a chance,”
he buys and sells multiple times in one day.
And in large lots.
He repeats this many times a day.
For someone who can spot opportunities many times a day, he surely has tremendous talent.
What to me looks like mere short-term noise,
he enters without hesitation.
As expected.
His charts are special.
He seems to see more trend reversals than others.
At least that’s how it appears to him.
The tops and bottoms of waves are the same for him.
If there’s a small rebound,
“It won’t go down again.”
If it falls a little,
“The rise ends here.”
He decides.
He reacts to the chart faster than a 1-minute chart.
Before the candlesticks close, he’s already drawn the next conclusion.
To me, it still looks like
“Just a little movement.”
but inside him, the market regime has already changed.
Perhaps he is an evolution of AI.
From what I can see as noise,
he reads the future.
Still, that future often misses the mark.
For such a person, he has a habit.
“If I’d just stuck to stocks and not touched FX, I’d be a billionaire by now.”
He says this with a smile, many times.
I think so too.
Then why does he do FX?
Probably, he doesn’t even understand himself.
No.
Maybe, he actually does understand.
He wants to win in FX.
Winning in FX would make him happier by many times than winning in stocks.
And when he wins,
“I knew it after all.”
He thinks that.
Probably what he desires isn’t money alone.
He wants the very fact that he won in FX.
On the other hand, he doesn’t bet all his funds on stocks.
If he wins in stocks, he should focus there.
Anyone would think so.
Yet he doesn’t.
Why?
Probably, he himself doesn’t have true confidence in continuing to win in stocks.
He buys on the dips and sells them back up.
Repeating that yields profits.
At least to me, his way of winning in stocks doesn’t seem as trusted as FX.
Therefore, he won’t bet everything on stocks.
This is interesting.
In FX, he cannot wait.
He looks for chances many times a day, buying and selling repeatedly.
But in stocks, he can wait.
Wait until it falls.
He buys stocks he’s been eyeing only when there’s a big discount.
If not, he doesn’t buy.
When FX isn’t going well, he looks for stocks.
He looks at stocks he’s aiming for.
If they’re cheap, he buys.
If not, he doesn’t buy.
He doesn’t force himself to find another stock.
And then, he returns quickly to FX charts.
Probably, this is why he can wait in stocks in the end.
He doesn’t keep looking at stocks.
He doesn’t buy unless it’s at the price he wants.
Even after buying, he doesn’t chase price movements all the time.
Thus, he doesn’t do unnecessary things.
As a result, he can wait.
But FX is different.
He is curious.
So he looks.
Because he looks, he sees something that looks like a chance.
Because he sees a chance, he re-enters.
In stocks,
he waits by not looking.
In FX,
he cannot wait because he looks too much.
Ironically, he wins in stocks which he cares least about,
He often asks me,
“Are you winning now?”
“No, unrealized losses.”
If I tell him that, he looks a little glad and says,
“I see. That’s too bad.”
He consoles me, perhaps.
Probably.
And when he’s losing, he says this:
“But I’m winning in stocks.”
That’s a convenient phrase.
“If my FX unrealized losses decrease a little more, I’ll settle and retire.”
I’ve heard that many times.
But there’s no sign of him retiring.
Rather, when unrealized losses decrease, he feels safe, and rather than settling, he adds positions.
What looks like a dead end to me, looks like a new opportunity to him.
As expected.
And again the market reverses.
This time, the added positions reverse as well.
Unrealized losses accelerate with the added volume.
“Wait a little more and I’ll settle.”
He was supposed to say that, but before he knows it,
He was waiting to retire, but
retirement seems farther away than ever.
Still, he says.
“I’m winning in stocks.”
If he is losing in FX, what he should look at is FX.
Why did he enter?
Why did he not cut it?
Why did he take small profits and endure large unrealized losses?
Why did he add to positions at a point of escape?
Why does he see opportunities several times a day?
If you don’t see that, no matter how many hundreds of millions of yen in margin you have, you’ll repeat the same thing.
FX losses amount to 200 million yen.
Stock gains amount to several tens of millions.
And today, again, he’s looking at FX charts.
Nevertheless, he says,
“But I’m winning in stocks.”
I think,
“Well, good for you.”
The End
【This time’s reflections】
What you need when you lose is not excuses, but
to reflect on “why you made that decision.”
In resilience FX, we compile criteria for making judgments, not just feelings.
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