Zhang Mengzhu
The weather was nice the day I returned to Hangzhou.
I came out of the station, did not go home, and headed straight to the West Lake. I walked along the lake for a long time, then finally found a quiet spot and sat down. The surface of the lake was very calm. Occasionally, a breeze passed by, creating a patch of fine ripples. In the distance, someone was rowing a boat, and faint laughter drifted over.
Sitting there, I thought about everything that had happened over the years.
That small stool was something I bought for 20 yuan when I first entered the market. I picked it up at a secondhand market in Hangzhou. It was made of green plastic and creaked whenever I sat on it. Every day, I sat on that stool watching the market, often for seven or eight hours at a time. In summer, my backside would be covered in sweat; in winter, I could feel the coldness of the plastic even through my pants. But it stayed with me for a long time—so long that I no longer remembered ever using any other chair.
That stool witnessed the first large sum of money I made, as well as the losses I suffered. It moved with me from a rented room to a new home, from one room to two. Later, I placed it in the corner of my study. I would occasionally glance at it when passing by, but I never sat on it again.
That evening, I took it out of the study, walked to the West Lake, and threw it out with all my strength. With a dull plop, it sank, barely disturbing the surface of the water.
After throwing it away, I stood by the lake for a while. Suddenly, I remembered that many years ago, when I had just come to Hangzhou, I had also sat alone by the West Lake. Back then, I had nothing. There were only a few thousand yuan in my account, and I was completely at a loss about the future. But I was not afraid then, because losing meant only losing—I had nothing to lose anyway. After I made money, I actually became afraid: afraid of losing, afraid of drawdowns, afraid of being surpassed, afraid of ending up back at square one overnight. That fear was more torturous than the losses themselves.
After returning to where I was staying that night, I wrote a line in my notebook:
"K-lines themselves have neither good nor evil; good and evil depend on whether you treat them as appearances or as your mind."
I only understood this after losing a great deal of money.
When I first started trading, I treated the K-line as “appearance”—rising was good, falling was bad; red meant joy, green meant worry. My emotions were completely controlled by those few bars every day. I was happy when prices rose and dejected when they fell, my entire state swinging up and down like a roller coaster. Only later did I realize that the K-line itself was nothing. It was merely the trajectory of prices. It had no good or evil, no right or wrong. It simply recorded every breath the market took. Rising was not necessarily good, and falling was not necessarily bad. The key was the perspective with which you viewed it.
When you treat it as “appearance,” you see rises and falls, gains and losses, and changes in your account balance. When you treat it as “mind,” you see the market’s emotions, the flow of capital, and the fluctuations of human nature. The former makes you a slave to the K-line; the latter makes you an interpreter of it. The difference determines whether you are led around by the market or are the one leading it.
In the end, trading is truly not a competition of technical skills. Give it six months to a year, and anyone can learn the technical side of things. But whether you can internalize those skills until they become instinct, whether you can remain rational when emotions run high, and whether you can continue to believe in your system after a string of losses—these are what truly distinguish experts from ordinary traders.
I threw away that stool, and I also threw away the version of myself who sat on it, constantly worried about gains and losses. From that day on, I no longer felt extreme joy or sorrow over the K-line’s rises and falls. I held when prices rose and stopped out when they fell; everything followed the rules. My emotional swings diminished, and my account instead began to grow steadily.
Life is actually the same. When you care too much about gains and losses, you end up unable to hold on to anything. When you stop caring, everything instead settles firmly into your hands. So it is with trading, and so it is with life.
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