People in general have a tough time wrapping their heads around the statistical nature of trading performance. The idea that you could have a great start for one month, have five losers in a row in a couple of days and draw down your account back to where you started, and then resume your upward PnL trend, is not only counterintuitive to how we expect to make progress in usual vocations (where we either have periods of no progress or make upward progress as we exert more effort, certainly not "negative" progress). It also takes a shift in mentality from:
"I am making this amount per day" to
"I am behaving this way every day knowing that the math will work out in my favor"- so yeah, not an obvious shift in the way to think.
To make things even more daunting, one's trading performance is a pure function of one's trading system (which generically speaking, encompasses all behaviors and strategies you're deploying), which can be very uncorrelated from the market action itself. Depending on your strategy, you could see steady returns every day even in the most volatile of markets. This becomes reassuring when everyone's losing money in a bear market, but painfully FOMO-inducing when things are ripping higher. This was approximately my experience in 2020, when I refused to shift strategies to become a meme-stock trader. In hindsight, it 1) may have been life-changing but 2) at the same time shouldn't matter since my own strategies should have resulted in similar if not better results in the long haul (that's of course a different story). The mathematical reality of consistent profitability is that you should pretty much ignore all market noise--even if that's a once-in-a-decade frenzy in small-cap stocks. Compounding, or even linear gains, can really overshadow these flash-in-the-pan moments in time.
Lastly, there is another aspect of "independence" that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around, that of your own market participation. As traders, we capitalize on scenarios that suit us. These may not always coincide with when the rest of market participants are active, whether that be right after market open, during earnings announcements, etc. So it becomes imperative to explicitly not participate when times are not right for you, and this may be 90% of the time! Any attempts to force things may actually sabotage your returns, and what's really weird is this ability to simply step in when appropriate and essentially make a living. Totally counterintuitive to our 9-to-5 mentality, where it's the burden of non-stop meetings and obligations that we've come to expect. Train your brain to shift from:
"I must be doing something wrong since I'm not participating" to
"Barely trading in spite of all the market action is perfectly fine, for my returns are independent from the market itself"
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