You have been trading for most of a year. Some weeks were green. The account is smaller than when you started, and the honest answer to why is that you do not know.
The reason is in the trades you already took. Getting it out of them takes one evening.
Is it normal to lose for months?
Partly.
A way of trading that makes money over a year still has bad stretches inside it. Ten losses in a row happen. A flat three months happens. Nothing has gone wrong on those days.
A red year does not prove your trading is broken, and it does not prove it is fine. On its own it says very little. "Keep going" and "quit" are both useless until you have looked.
What the look usually finds is one of three things.
Do you have a written list of what you take?
Most people asking this question do not.
They have a feel for a good setup. The feel moves with the week, the market and the mood, so no two trades test the same thing. You end up with a hundred trades and a hundred slightly different experiments. Nothing adds up, because there is nothing to add up.
The fix is an evening with a blank page. What has to be true before you take a trade. Where you get in. Where your stop goes, the price where you get out at a loss. What you do once you are in.
Each thing on that list is a confluence: one condition you want to see before you click. What confluence means in trading shows what other people put on theirs.
If you cannot write the list, that is your answer for now, and it is the cheapest of the three to fix.
Do you take trades that are not on the list?
This is the most common of the three, and the most annoying, because the strategy was fine.
You have the list. Then price runs away from you and you get in late. Or the setup is three quarters there and you take it anyway. Or you move your stop further out to give the trade room, and a small planned loss turns into a big one.
Those trades land in your results next to the trades you took properly. Added together they look like a bad strategy. So you go looking for a new one, and the new one gets the same treatment.
One field on every trade separates them: did I follow my rules, yes or no. Losing month: is it your strategy or how you traded it walks through what each answer means.
Does your size grow after a good run?
Four winners in a row, and the fifth trade feels safer than the first one did. The fifth trade is the same trade with more money on it.
This pattern turns a decent year red without a single bad month of trading. You collect small wins at your normal size and hand them back in one loss at triple size.
It leaves a mark you can look for. Your largest losses sit within a few trades of your largest wins. If your journal records what you risked on each trade, that takes two minutes to check.
How do you find out which one it is?
Take your last forty trades. Forty is few enough to cover in one evening and enough for a first look.
Mark each trade yes or no: did this trade follow the rules you had at the time. Be hard about it. Your memory will be kind to you, so use the chart and the times rather than the feeling.
Then total the two piles separately.
If you cannot do the marking at all, you have the first pattern. Write the list.
What would you see if the pattern is really there?
If the trades outside your rules are the problem, the yes-pile comes out around flat or better and the no-pile holds most of the loss. That is the good outcome. You can fix it yourself, starting with the next trade.
If both piles lose, the rules themselves might be wrong. They might also be fine for a market that has not shown up lately.
If the yes-pile is tiny, you cannot judge the strategy yet. You can judge one thing: you have not really been trading it.
If the size pattern is yours, it shows in the sizes. The big losses sit right behind the good runs.
What does this look like in a real journal?
Tom is the trader in EdgeFlow's demo. His example journal ends around break-even, at +0.02R per trade (R is your result in units of what you risked). Look inside it and one combination of his confluences averages +0.53R across 63 trades. The rest of his trades pull the total back to zero.
Nothing about Tom's strategy was broken. The money he made was hidden in the average. Your own piles can show the same thing. This is example data, and it describes Tom only.
Watch Tom's journal step by step in the demo
Will counting fix any of this?
No.
Counting tells you what a habit cost you in your own money. It does not remove the pull to enter early or to double up after a win. On the next fast morning that pull feels as strong as it did last time.
What changes is that the habit now has a price on it. A price is easier to argue with than a feeling.
How much can forty trades tell you?
Less than you want.
Forty trades is a first look. A run of them can go either way on luck, so a gap between the two piles is a place to keep watching. How many trades before you can trust a setup explains why the number has to be much higher before you lean on it.
Keep marking the field, and look at the piles again in two months with more trades behind them.
What can you do this week?
Write the list, if you do not have one. One page, plain words, so a friend could take the same trade from it.
Add one field to every trade from now on: did I follow my rules. How to keep a trading journal shows a version that takes two minutes a trade.
Then leave it alone until you have forty trades, and do the sort.
Questions people also ask
Why do most new traders lose money?
Most start without a written list of what they take, so every trade is a different experiment. They also break the rules they do have. Both show up once you mark each trade as followed or not followed.
Is it my strategy or is it me?
Sort your trades by whether you followed your rules. If the followed pile does fine, the strategy is not the problem. If both piles lose, look at the rules.
EdgeFlow keeps the trades where you followed your rules apart from the ones where you did not, with the number of trades behind each side. If the trouble is rules you know and still break, read breaking your own rules.