Personalization Is Your Greatest Edge
It’s how you handle the discomforts of trading
Written with Kyna Kosling from The Trading Resource Hub.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth:
Your edge lies in how you interact with discomfort and uncertainty.
Because trading is both. Every. Single. Day.
“When it clicks, it becomes easy” is a disingenuous claim.
There’s no free lunch. Trading is permanent frustration. You rarely get periods of smooth sailing — the highs come with lows.
Trading can become easier over time, but it never becomes “easy”:
Sitting out during a poor environment? That’s uncomfortable.
Holding on to a volatile name as it rides a key moving average? That’s extremely uncomfortable.
Weathering the inevitable drawdowns while trying to adhere to your simple rules? DISCOMFORT.
There are dozens of examples. And none are “cured” by lines on a chart.
The market isn’t a geometry test.
You cannot reduce discretionary trading to a formulaic science (although many have tried).
If your world outside trading revolves around detail-oriented, deterministic outcomes — for example, because you’re a scientist — your impulse is to solve complex problems.
…except there’s nothing to “solve” in the market. Certainty is an illusion.
Even if you trade the exact same strategy, with the exact same rules, as someone else, you’ll get completely different results — because their brain is different from yours.
You can copy someone’s external framework, but not their internal wiring.
Your relationship with discomfort is different from theirs — which will come out when you trade.
You can condition yourself to handle the constant discomfort, but can’t fully hide your personality. No one is precisely you, except you.
And that’s a good thing. Because your uniqueness is your edge.
Your success in the market depends on how you handle discomfort. That’s why personalization is REQUIRED in trading.
IN THIS ARTICLE
1. Rules don’t optimize for perfect outcomes.
1. Rules don’t optimize for perfect outcomes.
A trader stuck in the Certainty Mindset often thinks they’ve done something wrong when they have a losing trade. After several losing trades in a row, they then end up changing their rules or even their entire strategy.
Plenty of losing trades don’t have a “reason”. They just didn’t work.
But when you haven’t truly internalized that you can’t control the outcome, you end up searching for that “perfect” set of rules. Some traders get stuck there for years.
…except trading rules aren’t a magic cheat code that optimize for perfect outcomes.
Rules — the ones you keep — are really tools to manage YOU.
Since rules are decision-making aids, the best rules are forged through experience.
Personally, I’m very strict about my risk and trade management rules — these keep me safe and in line with my strategy. Otherwise, I keep my rules to the bare minimum. The rest is a framework, based on a crystal-clear understanding of my strategy: trend trading and buying on consolidations.
You don’t need a rule for every single decision point. The market isn’t a diagram. You just need rules that keep you safe and disciplined to simplify your decision-making processes — nothing more, nothing less.
A borrowed ruleset only becomes meaningful when you test them.
So, get into the arena. Engage with the market. Figure out what does and doesn’t work for YOU. Because if you just adopt someone else’s rules without questioning them, you’re operating from a place of certainty — which doesn’t exist in the market.
Rules should be the result of personalized experimentation, tailored to exploit your unique strengths or rewire your unique weaknesses.
Copying a rule designed to bring out another person’s strength — that you may not have — simply won’t work. The same thing applies to rules designed to fix someone else’s weakness.
For example, as a trend trader, you must make peace with holding through the top to catch the meat of the trend. You must also find a way to not sell a stock even when it’s extended — because in an uptrend, what’s high can go higher.
Dead-simple concepts get muddied by the often-fierce battle that takes place in your head.
Maybe you have a rule to not sell until the stock closes below the 9-day moving average, but have difficulty implementing it when it matters most — on the strongest trends. The more extended a stock gets, the stronger that name, and the more you second-guess your own sell rule.
What helps me is taking a mix of swing and position trades. In other words, I use a mix of selling into strength (swings) and selling into weakness (position trades). This smooths the inevitable drawdowns as the market environment shifts, while allowing me to lock in greater profits from my position trades.
But “doing nothing” is a discomfort of the market that few talk about.
2. Action ≠ progress.
Doing nothing at the right time gives you power — and is often the best course of action, especially if you’re a swing or position trader:
In an environment without follow-through, do nothing.
In a conducive environment, let your open positions work (i.e. do nothing).
Many dismiss doing nothing as “missing out”, often due to social media noise.
Others lack a crystal-clear understanding of their strategy — including the environment needed for that strategy to thrive — or don’t truly have a strategy to begin with. Having every strategy means having no strategy.
If you don’t know when to do nothing, you’ll remain seduced by “action” until you gain that clarity.
Operating in an environment conducive to your style gives you the highest probability of a favorable outcome. Despite the avalanche of noise standing in your way, it can really be that simple. For example, a high-volatility environment with low follow-through is either conducive to your strategy or it isn’t. Act accordingly.
But make no mistake: the market decides the outcome. Your job is to have a strategy and follow your plan, however uncomfortable that might be due to the whirlwind that takes place between your ears.
Coming to terms with that whirlwind is a never-ending process. Remember: trading never becomes “easy”, only easier.
Truly internalizing simple, powerful concepts is where you can make the most progress as a trader.
Like many things, that’s much easier said than done. But simply identifying this as a goal can be powerful, and even more so when you can identify YOUR specific problems and their root causes. This is your race to run, no one else’s.
A lot of what I do with traders on my service isn’t teaching new concepts, but showing them that the concepts they understand intellectually — because they’re so dead simple — hadn’t actually been internalized.
Reframing your mindset often helps close that gap.
For example, when doing nothing, a huge reframe is to learn to love the “time off” when the market forces you out. Realizing YOU are in control of when you enter — and stay out of — the meat grinder can be a huge breakthrough.
Suddenly, that downtime is a paradise — and one of your main strengths.
You start to treat trading as a business rather than a compulsion.
The same goes when holding for a bigger move: let the trend work for you without succumbing to constant noise and action on social media. Learn that less is more — not just less noise, but also less button-pressing, less micro-managing, and less intraday screen time.
If you have trouble holding a stock for a big move as it rides a key moving average, consider mixing swing and position trades. De-risking trades by selling a partial into strength gives you the psychological edge of having taken a small profit, and makes holding less daunting.
You must also know in your bones that you will NOT catch the top.
Trying to catch a top is just guesswork. Let the market decide, and let a key moving average be your guide.
Reviewing past momentum names will help with this: when using the replay function on TradingView (or similar), you’ll see the strongest trending stocks often riding a key moving average for much longer than you might expect.
You need to prove to yourself how stocks move so you can internalize what’s “normal” in a trend. That doesn’t require 10,000 hours of blood-shot eyes — the real deep dive is inward.
Risk happens in real time.
Despite the obvious, simple trend in hindsight, the daily emotions in strong trenders can be a rollercoaster.
How do YOU react to pullbacks and extensions? And how can you make yourself follow your plan in spite of your emotions? For example, can you condition yourself by sizing smaller first, so you reduce the emotional swings?
Only once you truly start exploiting your unique strengths, while understanding and mitigating your weaknesses, do you begin to access your ability to outperform. Remember that rules are there to manage you. Borrowing is necessary; copying is a dead end.
However uncomfortable you may find the thought, you’ll never hide your personality from your trading. You must be comfortable in your own skin — warts and all. Trying to bury your personality under someone else’s won’t work.
3. You can’t “follow” your way to success.
At its core, trading is you vs you. You’re not in competition with anyone else. You don’t have to deal with corporate group-think. You don’t need to follow the herd or someone else’s rules.
In these respects, trading is glorious. But they also make you — and only you —responsible for your actions and your failures.
Self-leadership is non-negotiable in trading; you can’t shift blame to anyone else. “Followers” struggle the most in this business. There’s no secret that can be handed down. The real work is done internally, by yourself.
You must engage, think for yourself, and personalize.
Your trading must fit YOUR unique personality. That’s why I push hard against a lot of Fintwit BS: I try to encourage people to think for themselves.
It has nothing to do with being “negative”. It’s just the opposite: you can’t get more positive than self-leadership, self-motivation, and perseverance.
Trying to adopt someone else’s process and rules like a paint-by-numbers exercise won’t lead to long-term success. You can’t check out of all decision-making. In fact, discretionary trading is decision-making clarity.
Any success you find in trading must come from YOU.
Personalization lies at the heart of your journey. You won’t find any successful trader who blindly followed their way to consistent profitability.
Remember: when you copy someone else’s strategy, you’re copying their external framework — not their internal wiring. Your strengths and weaknesses will eventually be on full display. Embrace them and use them to your advantage, or you’ll constantly be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Successful traders that achieve longevity and outperformance don’t have a “cheat code” of scans and setups. They’ve learned to exploit their personal strengths.
Personalization is the beating heart of your journey.
You “borrow” from those who came before you and form a framework — a simple conceptual strategy. Then, the real work begins: tweaking, adjusting, and rewiring that framework to suit your own personality while coming to terms with who you are as a trader.
After hitting other important milestones, like grasping the need for risk management and gaining a crystal-clear understanding of your strategy (including the environment it needs to thrive), most of the remaining journey — and where you can make most progress — revolves around personalization.
This is a never-ending process. It evolves as you yourself change. For example, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve changed from a shorter-term swing trader into more of a position trader. Many others have made the same progression.
Everyone’s reality is different — which means you must tailor your trading to suit your unique strengths and weaknesses.
Personalization begins with brutal self-honesty and a willingness to experiment and adapt.
Once you have a framework, you need to align it with YOUR personality, such as your ability to hold. While you can condition yourself to improve that and other abilities — for example, by sizing smaller first — you can’t completely rewire who you are.
“Everyone is different” isn’t a platitude. It materially affects how you should be trading. Here are some examples:
SCREEN TIME
How much time can, and more importantly, do you want to spend on the screen?
Screen time ≠ progress. What amount works for you? I know profitable traders who spend zero time in front of the screen during market hours (for example, because they’re in Australia). Meanwhile, I see hundreds of losing traders glued to their charts, staring at every tick.
Also, when works for you? Some people call the first hour of trading “amateur hour”, which makes me laugh, because that’s usually when I operate, and how I’ve compounded an account over 27 years.
You MUST find what actually suits you, not what you think is required. There’s no prescription and a wide berth for personalization. Make trading fit your life, not the other way around.
GOALS
Are you looking to “make a name” for yourself? Or are you simply looking to improve your financial situation through compounding?
Be brutally honest with yourself. You can’t be at odds with your goals and expectations. A 20-year-old without dependents may have a radically different goal (whether realistic or not) than a married 40-year-old with three kids and a mortgage.
Plus, what are your quality of life expectations? I firmly believe that quality of life and level of aggression are inversely correlated. Figure out where you lie and strike a balance that suits you.
RISK TOLERANCE
When single and in your 20s, your risk tolerance is totally different than when you’re nearing retirement and have a family. It also depends on your account size and experience level — more aspects personal to you.
But two people of the same age and with similar circumstances may have wildly different risk tolerances simply because they’re different people. Some people are wired to accept more risk than others. Embrace it.
Embrace your strengths, reduce your weaknesses.
Your edge lies in harnessing what makes you unique. YOU are the edge — but you’re also your own biggest barrier if you blindly copy what you think is required, rather than find what actually suits you.
Personalization starts with thinking through your entire process: what’s the purpose of each rule? Why does someone else have it? Does it even make sense for you? How can you tweak it?
As you question and engage, some “rules” will disappear entirely. Others get adjusted to suit you, which you then keep tweaking as you change over the years.
4. Outsized returns have a price.
Tons of people ask me: which strategy makes the most money?
The answer is the strategy that suits you best. That’s the ONLY way you’ll be able to repeat your process, and edge, for years.
Fintwit will show you the icing, but not how the cake was baked.
You rarely hear about the price to pay for chasing outsized returns.
When you truly get aggressive, you can achieve greater returns — but there’s no free lunch. They come at a price: deeper drawdowns, increased anxiety, and a level of stress most people underestimate.
Again, everyone is different. And not everyone is willing to pay the same price. Remember that social media is a highlight reel — a filtered and curated lens, where people only share what they want you to see.
Operating amid the constant frustration that is trading, while maintaining your mental equilibrium, is the job. Run your own race. There’s no finish line unless you quit.
Most of what I’ve covered will feel obvious.
As you read, you may have been thinking: “Yes, I know all that.”
But knowing it and behaving in line with it are two completely different things. The entire point of this article is to get you to examine the gap between the two — because that gap is where most of the real work lives.
For example, are you actually managing your trades as you think you are? Or do you define yourself as a swing trader, but neglect to take partials into strength, hoping each trade is the next triple?
Be brutally honest with yourself. You can’t lie to yourself AND form a system that suits you.
On my service, I have a former software engineer with a PhD in economics who didn’t take any trades from April–June 2025 (the rally after the tariff debacle) because, in his words, “none of it made sense to me”.
I helped him realize that he was completely ignoring price, even though he described himself as a “price action trader”. He didn’t truly believe that price is his signal.
And that’s really the point of this exercise: discovering your sticking points.
You can’t fix an issue until you know what it is and what’s causing it.
That’s why you should examine what you’re doing and what you really believe.
The concepts are often simple. But there can be a colossal gap between intellectually understanding them and internalizing them.
—Matt Petrallia, CMT
Founder, Trading Equilibrium
Awesome one Matt
This is some collab 🔥🔥😍