On Account Ramp-up

 A slightly unconventional post is in order today, something involving a mixture of behavioral finance and trading. In the real world of trading, people will often apply behavioral tricks that assist them in overcoming psychological barriers that cause trading mishaps. A few tricks I've encountered include wiring out money from one's trading account (to protect capital since anything exposed to the markets can essentially be wiped out by a single or series of bad decisions), hiding one's PnL (to prevent "trading one's PnL", though this can also be a strength if done properly as I mentioned in a previous post), and always taking the side of the underdog who is digging one's self out of a hole. The latter trick is probably the one most purely rooted in psychology, as it essentially just calls for an alteration in your mindset as opposed to a systemic change that sets you up for downstream benefits. 

Speaking from personal experience, don't underestimate the power of psychological tricks to help ramp up your account. Sometimes we tend to think we can overcome all barriers through sheer willpower, but that's a fool's game. Instead, set yourself up with a practice that can reliably weather the inevitable storms that are faced in trading. A heuristic that I have discovered is that if your account size is too large relative to what you can handle (i.e. if the fluctuations have a meaningful effect on your life), you will face challenges in ramping up your account beyond a certain point. You will simply think about gains way too much at that point, and it will pollute your ability to make a sound decision. An easy trick is to wire out profits until you play with "house money", but with the full realization that this is not play money since a serious drawdown would require you to re-fund your account with previously extracted funds and start all over! Another powerful trick is to simply trade during allocated sessions, as it limits your ability to have to adapt on the fly to the various crazy scenarios that pop up at different hours of market activity (compromising your edge), and also allows you ample time to prepare for the allotted session. It's only through many iterations of failure that I've come up with these types of heuristics, and took some time to truly trust them and adhere to them since it's easy to brush things off without enough evidence. I encourage everyone to develop, test, and execute their own tricks in overcoming barriers to account growth (whose psychological underpinnings are beyond the scope of this post).