What 890 trades in six weeks actually taught me

For six weeks I traded almost every session, and like a lot of active traders I mostly measured myself one day at a time: green today, red yesterday, roughly even in my head. Then I did something uncomfortable. I exported my entire brokerage statement — every fill, every fee — and reconstructed the whole period trade by trade. The number at the bottom was −$2,059 across 890 trades in 44 different tickers. This is what the data actually said, as opposed to what I'd been telling myself.

My winners were fine. My losers were the problem.

Here's the first thing that jumped out. If you add up every symbol I made money on, that's +$3,107 spread across 21 names. My scalping works. The issue is the other column: 23 losing symbols summing to −$5,166. I wasn't failing to find good trades. I was letting the bad ones grow far past the size of the good ones.

Put the two columns side by side and the whole story is right there. My edge is real but small; my losers are rare but enormous. That is a textbook risk-management failure, not a stock-picking one — and it's oddly encouraging, because sizing is fixable in a way that “being wrong” isn't.

The asymmetry that quietly killed the account

I split the 27 sessions into green days and red days and the picture got even clearer. I had 11 green days averaging +$243 and 16 red days averaging −$296. Read that twice. I lost money on more days than I won, and my average losing day was bigger than my average winning day. That is the exact opposite of the shape you want. A sustainable trader usually has losers that are smaller than winners, so that even a sub-50% hit rate still nets out positive. I had it upside down on both axes.

The math of survival in trading is brutally simple: keep your average loss smaller than your average win. I did the reverse — more losing days than winning ones, and bigger ones too. No entry signal on earth overcomes that.

Where the money really went: leverage

When I sorted my losses by ticker, they weren't scattered evenly across dozens of bad scalps. They were concentrated. The single biggest hole was a pair of leveraged SK Hynix products — SKHU (2x long) and SKHZ (inverse) — which together cost me −$1,881. Add Focus Universal (FCUV) at −$707 and NextCure (NXTC) at −$589, and those handful of names more than account for the entire six-week loss.

Broken down by product type it's stark: every leveraged ETF I touched netted −$1,504, while everything else combined — all the ordinary micro-cap scalps — came to −$555. In other words, roughly three-quarters of my damage came from daily-reset leveraged funds I kept reaching for when a normal position wouldn't move fast enough. I wrote a separate breakdown of exactly why those products bleed in The Leveraged ETF Trap, because it deserves its own page.

The two days that mattered most

My best session was July 30 at +$671, and my worst was July 28 at −$1,108. Notice that my worst day was 65% larger than my best day. One bad afternoon in the leveraged SK Hynix trade — a single position sized far too big — erased roughly four of my good days. When people say “it only takes one blowup,” this is the concrete version: the equity curve peaks near +$470 in early July, rolls over on the 14th, and never recovers because a couple of oversized sessions dug a hole the base hits couldn't fill.

What I'm actually changing

Data is only useful if it changes behavior, so here is what this exercise is forcing me to do. First, a hard per-trade size cap, applied to leveraged products at half the size of a normal scalp, because their real risk is double what the share count suggests. Second, a daily maximum loss — a number that, once hit, ends my trading day whether I “feel” like I can win it back or not; every one of my worst sessions came from trying to trade out of a hole. Third, no adding to a losing position and no re-entering a name I just got stopped out of in the same session, which is where my FCUV loss ballooned. None of these are insights about the market. They're guardrails against me.

The uncomfortable gift of a losing stretch is clarity. I came into this thinking I needed better entries. The statement told me the opposite: my entries are fine, my exits are fine, and my sizing is what's bleeding me out. If cutting the leveraged bets and capping my worst days does nothing but bring my average loss below my average win, the same 890 trades turn green. That's the plan for the next six weeks — and I'll publish the statement again so you can hold me to it.