Here's a Secret to Controlling Trading Emotions

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Here’s a Secret to Controlling Trading Emotions

Let’s start with a question. What’s a better risk strategy - one that loses $300 on one thousand 💸 or one that loses $100,000 on a million? 💰

Logic says the former, but almost all of us say the latter because, like all people, we react with our hearts ❤️ rather than our heads 🤯. The prospect of losing $100,000 is far more terrifying than the idea of losing $300, even though in percentage terms, the $300 is a much worse loss 📉.

Money is also the reason why it’s easier to double an account than most people think. Doubling an account is always a function of taking on way too much risk, even if it doesn’t seem like that at the time. The classic rule of thumb is that in the best strategy, your drawdown should be about half your return, which means to make 100%, you need to be willing to lose 50% 📊. Again, this is much easier to do with a $1,000 account than a $100,000 or $1 million account. After all, getting margin-called on a $1,000 account is far less painful financially, which is why the smartest thing that traders who trade without stops, the “trade and pray” method 🙏, could do is open multiple small accounts rather than keep all their capital in one. You’ll almost certainly get margin-called in a few, but you may get lucky 🍀 and catch a mean-reverting market that turns all your average-down trades green and doubles or even quadruples your equity, paying for all those margin stops.

Trading is full of these non-intuitive tricks 🧠.

Take a look at the equity curves below. Which one looks better? 📈
They’re both trading the exact same strategy, with the same pairs, on the same time frame.

They’re both profitable, but the second chart looks much worse. Yet that one trades with a 5:1 risk-reward ratio ⚖️. It risks 50 pips to make 250. Every textbook in the world will tell you this is a great approach. After all, the better the risk-reward ratio, the less accurate you need to be to win 🏆.

Now look at the first chart. What do you think? 1:2? 1:3? 1:4? How about 1:5! That version risks 250 pips to make 50. That’s insane on the membrane! 🧠 You’d need 83% accuracy just to break even. And yet, trading over a 42-month time frame across the seven major pairs, the strategy hit winners 89.5% of the time, beating that breakeven spread handily 🥇.

But here’s the kicker. Look at the drawdown. You’d think a strategy that loses five times more than it wins would have stomach-churning equity dips 🌊. It doesn’t. Sure, there are drawdowns, but they’re quickly recouped as the high win rate makes up for them 📈. The 5:1 approach, on the other hand, has violent drop-offs as trade after trade gets stopped out ❌.

And now you begin to understand why insurance companies make so much money 💸 while many venture-capital funds do not. In trading, as in business, common sense is often unconventional 🔄.

💡 How Some Traders Double Their Accounts While Others Lose It All

The secret often comes down to psychology, not strategy. The numbers on your screen change everything. Losing $500 feels like a small bump; losing $50,000 feels like the end of the world, even if they represent the same percentage loss.

That’s why so many traders perform brilliantly on smaller accounts but freeze when the stakes get larger. The emotional weight of trading six figures can sabotage even the best systems.

This is exactly the psychological edge Axi Select was built to solve.
Axi Select understands the struggle of managing emotions when big numbers are on the line. Their funding program is structured differently. It copies your trades from your own brokerage account, so you trade the capital you’re comfortable with - $500, $1,000, $5,000 - while their system mirrors those trades into larger funded accounts of $100K, $500K, or even $1 million.

You stay calm and focused, managing your own realistic P/L, while still benefiting from the profits of the large copied account. No panic over big swings, no fear of zeros, just pure execution.

If you’ve ever struggled with discipline or emotional control when the account size grows, Axi Select lets you scale without the stress.

👉 Learn more about how Axi Select helps traders scale smart and keep their emotions intact.

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