Many traders can’t get past the first hurdle. This first hurdle is called the emotional hurdle. When everyone first enters the market, they will feel like they’re learning techniques—learning indicators, looking at structure, studying all kinds of methods. But only after they start losing money do they realize: you’re not losing to the market—you’re losing to yourself.

You clearly know this is a standard opportunity, but you don’t dare to enter because you’ve just taken a loss. You clearly know you shouldn’t enter, yet you still enter because you want to make the money back. At this point, you fall into a loop—missing out, regretting, acting impulsively, losing again. You can’t get through this hurdle, and then everything you do afterward—anything you move—has no real meaning.

The second hurdle is called the execution officer. Most people get stuck here for a long time. You already have a set of methods, and you know when to enter and when to exit. But the problem is: you can’t execute. You enter early because you’re afraid of missing out. You delay your stop-loss because you can’t accept it. You loosen your conditions because you feel this time should be fine. It’s not that you don’t have a system—you don’t have execution. And in trading, the most deadly thing is “almost”—falling just short.

The third hurdle is called the restraint hurdle. This is the hardest hurdle for retail traders to cross, because most people treat trading like a job. They feel that if they don’t place an order, then they aren’t making money. So they start trading constantly—ten-plus trades a day, even dozens. But truly stable traders, many times, don’t do anything all day. It’s not that they can’t understand; it’s that they understand, so they choose not to trade. Most of the time, the market isn’t worth participating in. The more you try to participate, the faster you lose. The essence of this hurdle is to fight against boredom.

The fourth hurdle is called the drawdown hurdle. This is the easiest one to break people down. In the beginning, you may already have started making money—maybe even a couple of weeks have gone smoothly. You begin to feel stable, and even start calculating how much you could earn if you keep this pace for a year. Then the drawdown comes—not a blow-up loss, but a series of small losses across several trades. The problem is that your mindset changes. You’re no longer trading according to the system. You start entering with a goal: to earn the money back. So your position size gets bigger, your stop-losses get looser, your trades increase, and eventually you fall into a state where the more you lose, the more you want to win it back—and the more you want to win it back, the faster you lose. Many people end up giving back everything they accumulated from before at this hurdle.

The fifth hurdle is called the cognition hurdle. This is the key to whether you can survive long-term. The market changes, and any method has a lifecycle. But most people treat their own method as a belief. Once it stops working, they don’t adjust—they just stubbornly keep going, because admitting the method doesn’t work is equivalent to admitting that you were wrong earlier. But those who truly walk out of it understand one thing: you’re not a person who belongs to some specific trading method. You’re simply someone who keeps adapting to the market.

You’ll find that these five hurdles have never been technical problems—everything is human nature. And most people are actually stuck in the first hurdle and the fourth hurdle, cycling repeatedly and never managing to get out. This market has never been short of opportunities; what it lacks is people who can stay steady in emotions and survive through drawdowns.

You don’t need to rush to make a lot of money. First, do two things well: keep your position size within what you can bear, and never make decisions with emotions. As long as you’re still in the game, as long as you haven’t been carried away by emotions and position sizing, the wave of market opportunity that truly belongs to you will come sooner or later.