Liquidation and going short of margin are traders’ rite of passage into adulthood.

A trader who has never faced liquidation, and has never been driven past margin to the point of ruin, ultimately has only ever lingered in the market’s gentle zone—it’s not the real way of entering the game.

Their biggest weakness isn’t a lack of skill, but the fact that the true gambling instinct for trading within them has never been properly awakened. They live forever in the comfort zone of losses they can control—so their nerve is soft, their understanding is shallow, and their execution drifts.

All the risk-control doctrines picked up secondhand and all the trading rules memorized from books remain only superficial knowledge. Without ever personally experiencing the suffocating moment when an account hits zero and debts flip upside down, respect for risk is just empty talk. What people call a trading system is nothing more than self-deception in a trend-following market.

In a rising market, everyone is a stock god and a futures god. Only the desperate dead-end of liquidation can tear apart a person’s luck-seeking and arrogance, forcing you to confront your own greed, hesitation, and shortcomings in understanding.

The grit buried deep in a trader—the backbone to withstand pressure, the savage decisiveness to act without hesitation—cannot be learned. It’s beaten out of you by massive losses. Real trading faith doesn’t come from the celebration of consecutive profits; it comes from having died once and then been reborn out of a life-and-death situation, bringing clarity and unshakeable conviction.

Liquidation is not the end—it’s the tribulation every top trader must pass through. Only when reverence is carved deep into the marrow, and the wildness is fully awakened, can you truly be considered an adult.

You think: does trading maturity mean learning to avoid risk, or learning to embrace risk?