System-level trading bugs

 Something that very few people will tell you about are the myriad things that can go wrong on top of the typical trading issues we face on a day-to-day basis, whether they be technically or psychologically rooted. The reason these are rarely discussed is a) they're rather customized per individual, i.e. everyone may have a different set of 'issues' they encounter and are forced to confront and correct, and b) they are not as "in the moment". One has to essentially zoom out and essentially look at the "daily" or "weekly" chart of their triggers and account-level performance bottlenecks. Portfolio managers do this all the time, but they have the luxury of being inherently low-frequency in their trading, so the timeframes with which they analyze their own behaviors and pitfalls roughly equals the timeframes of their trading frequency. 

Unfortunately, we active traders have to be cognizant of both the dynamics of our real-time activity (much like an air traffic controller) as well as what might be sabotaging us on larger timeframes. We could be repeating larger patterns or getting impacted by infrequent events in the same manner without even realizing it without taking a step back and analyzing what these patterns are and how they're impacting our accounts. I like to think of these as "system-level" trading issues. For example, there are famous stories of talented traders who might make money from Mon-Thurs, and then give back all profits on Friday (or similar behavior on say on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis, not to mention even intraday or after-hours). Then there are those folks who do very well up until a certain account value, then seemingly lose all their ability to trade well after that psychological threshold (which could be rooted in their past experiences with money). Or the individuals who do well in low-volatility sessions but then get wrecked when volatility hits, but just can't stay away.

It will pay every trader many-fold to simply identify these system-level bugs in their trading system/behavior, and make some tough decisions on what rules to put in place to prevent them going forward. It's a thousand of these steps that incrementally molds a trader into becoming great, not some overnight transformation where all stars just align!