The Reality Most Traders Don’t Want to Admit
You’ve been trading for 3, maybe 4, even 5 years already.
You’ve read the books.
You’ve watched the gurus.
You’ve tried dozens—no, hundreds—of strategies.
You’ve covered your chart with every line, zone, and indicator you could think of. You’ve analyzed every candlestick like it was a crime scene.
And somehow—somehow—nothing works consistently.
Your equity curve keeps sliding into the red.
Your account drifts downward like a slow bleed. Pathetic, right?
And the worst part?
You see other traders making money.
You see setups that “should” work.
You understand the logic.
But the moment you pull the trigger, the market acts like it has a personal vendetta against you.
There are days you want to quit this brutal game.
Find another career.
Walk away.
But then—you come back.
Every. Single. Time.
Determined to fight the market again, even though your emotions keep getting heavier, darker, and more volatile.
You win a few trades—just enough to keep you alive.
But they’re tiny victories in a long chain of losses that slowly drain your capital until the account eventually burns down.
And then the doubt creeps in.
Maybe this market is a scam.
Maybe you’re not cut out for this.
Maybe someone out there is manipulating everything and you’re just the puppet.
Here’s the twist:
The moment you started doubting yourself, you actually touched half the truth.
Because the truth is harsh:
You and the market have both been running inside a low-resolution reality — one that we constantly mistake for the higher-resolution reality that truly encompasses it.
I’m not joking.
You—and honestly, all of us at some point—misunderstood how this thing works right from the beginning. And the market slapped you hard for it on day one.
So now, it’s time to slow down.
Sit with this for a moment.
And hunt for the truth you’ve been missing:
- What is the real nature of the market?
- Why does your brain keep predicting it wrong?
- And is there a path back—an actual path—to trading in a way that doesn’t destroy you?
We’re about to peel back the curtain by exposing the two realities traders constantly confuse. Only then does everything finally make sense.
Navigating the Two Realities Traders Live In
We live in two realities simultaneously, and one of them—the physical reality—is at a higher resolution. What does that mean? Simply put, social reality is created and entirely encompassed by the physical reality.
To recognize which reality a given entity truly occupies, ask yourself a simple question: if this entity existed in the natural world, would it have any real significance? Look around—gold, Bitcoin, stacks of currency flaunting immense power and value in your civilization. Now, imagine a cow in the wild encountering them. What would it see?
A lump of metal that’s meaningless and inedible. Signals running through machines that make no sense. A string of numbers representing Bitcoin—utterly meaningless. A sheet of paper, flattened and pressed from wood pulp, with cryptic designs printed on it. That, my friend, is pure, raw physical reality. Harsh, unembellished, but far more real than any layer of social reality.
Once you realize this, it becomes clear: the flood of emotions inside you—fear, greed, frustration—are mostly concepts constructed by social reality, and so is the market. Social reality remains as chaotic as ever, operating on its lower-resolution layer.
Our fatal mistake? We invert the hierarchy. We treat social reality as the ultimate, the truest reality—and we immerse ourselves so deeply that we forget the higher-resolution physical reality. It becomes so real that losing a potential opportunity—one that hasn’t even happened yet—leaves us anxious, panicked, and trapped in FOMO spirals (read more on FOMO [here]). We build empires of belief—a house, a position, a portfolio—and trust that they will endure forever… until a whirlwind destroys everything we assumed was permanent. We grieve as if the universe itself had turned against us, though the cosmos could not care less about ownership or human constructs.
Social reality is the lower-resolution layer compared to physical reality, which is why it collapses far more easily. Speed matters. Picture this: you own a rare red diamond, believing it to be priceless. You’ve constructed a social reality entity around it—a concept of value. But if I offer $1 billion instead of $1 million, your “priceless” construct crumbles instantly. A playful thought experiment, but it demonstrates the fragility of social reality.
Consider Bitcoin in 2030, hypothetically hitting at $1 million. Many will refuse to accept that valuation because the price seems too low today. The lesson? Don’t waste your astonishment over the volatility of social constructs—reserve it for events like the Earth being swallowed by the sun, which, thankfully, is far off (at least in our lifetimes).
From this deadly mistake, our brains continue to apply the higher-order laws of physical reality onto social reality—a domain that can collapse much faster. We wake up one day to discover that the bank we trusted has failed, the stock market has crashed, and panic sets in. In a reality that fragile, expecting a “holy grail” trading formula to deliver perfect, absolute precision—just like a gold assay does—is the real stupidity. Because how do you measure the psychology of a chaotic crowd, or the resilience of a support zone you swear is unbreakable? Almost impossible. Everything in social reality is ephemeral and volatile.
Humanity has misunderstood this for millennia. Fortunately for us modern traders, neuroscience has advanced, converging with psychology and sociology. If it sounds crazy that trading requires psychological literacy—well, it is. Yet, I assure you, mastering the rules of human civilization—the ones embedded in social reality—can give you a decisive edge, potentially more valuable than any strategy you’ve read about.
Most recently, I immersed myself in Lisa Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion. It was like a wake-up call amid the noise of social reality, reflecting it against the lens of physical reality. I realized I exist between these two realities (you can find her book in the ad section on the right—consider it essential reading if you want to become a truly professional trader).
And this is a powerful starting point: using this insight as your compass to confront the two most painful challenges of a trader’s journey: your own emotions and the market’s intrinsic motion, both deeply rooted in social reality. We’ll dive deeper into this in the next section.
Misreading the True Nature of the Market
As we’ve already established, the market is not part of physical reality—it is a social reality. Which means that when you invest or trade, you’re not predicting prices; you’re predicting the predictions of a collective.
And that is one of the hardest tasks a human brain can attempt.
This also explains why so many traders consistently lose money: they cling to the tools, metrics, and expectations of physical reality while operating inside a domain that doesn’t follow those rules.
So the real question becomes:
If objective measurement—like a gold assay—doesn’t exist in a constantly shifting social reality, then what do we anchor ourselves to? Does that mean no method can ever work?
Modern psychology gives us the first real hint: consensus signals.
Social realities remain stable only because of a complex phenomenon called collective intentionality—what I simply call consensus.
A nation, a currency, a religion, or a long-lasting market trend survives because enough people share the same belief at the same time.
Once that shared belief weakens, the social structure becomes vulnerable—sometimes collapsing suddenly.
Earlier, we said that applying all the laws of physical reality to social reality is a mistake.
But here’s the twist: social reality does inherit some primal laws from the physical world—mainly cycles, equilibrium, and polarity. When combined with the role of consensus, these laws become the closest thing we have to “structure” inside an otherwise chaotic domain.
According to the law of cycles, there are periods when the market moves cleanly, beautifully—just like a textbook. That’s the prosperity phase, the moment when consensus reaches its peak.
This is when entering trades makes sense. Consensus supports you. The win-rate stabilizes.
But then comes the abyss.
A phase where consensus fragments into competing micro-groups, and the market moves like a distorted painting.
If you insist on entering this death-zone with your “holy grail,” your account will collapse.
This—right here—is the formula I use to navigate social reality instead of searching for a mythical perfect system.
Some traders claim the market is always chaotic. Others insist it’s always controlled by big players.
Both views are only half true.
Whales and institutions can manipulate the market easily when the crowd is obedient and aligned.
But when the crowd becomes fragmented?
You get a sideways mess—what I call the megaphone of madness — patterns that look like a toddler scribbled on the chart.
And even in cases where whales successfully steer the market, what are we actually doing when we try to follow them?
We’re predicting a prediction of a prediction.
If you’re still reading, then at the very least, you’re beginning to correct your original misconception:
the market is not a place where opportunity always exists.
Just like the sea has calm sunny days, it also has storms strong enough to rip you apart.
That’s the nature of social reality.
Over the past few years, I’ve realized that price action signals—on higher timeframes especially—reveal consensus more clearly than anything else.
That’s what we will anchor ourselves to as we walk the path toward becoming professional traders.
In the future, we’ll dive deeper into price-action structures that actually map onto consensus dynamics, instead of recycling shallow, contextless patterns floating around the internet—patterns with no foundation in any modern social science.
Are Emotions Hidden Puppeteers — or Just a Byproduct of How the Brain Constructs Reality?
Here comes the second big misconception: confusing the biological reality in your brain with the constructed reality you live in.
Let’s be blunt.
Natural reality is neurons, ions, and billions of electrical signals firing every second.
Social reality — including all the emotions you feel — exists inside that biological system as a constructed layer. This isn’t just personal confusion; it’s a thousand-year intellectual battle. And today, Constructed Emotion Theory leads the scientific evidence by a mile. (If you’re curious, the book link is on the right side of your screen.)
Back to the practical problem.
Some traders believe their emotions are “natural instincts,” a kind of built-in radar that helps them predict short-term market moves:
“This time I’m sure. I can feel it.”
Others assume emotions are inner wild animals they must suppress — that fear, excitement, or urge are primal forces “taking control.”
Reality says otherwise.
Barrett’s theory shows the brain constructs emotions based on predictions about social context plus a few raw sensory inputs. Emotions are labels your brain attaches to a basic physiological affect state. The purpose? To create “meaning” and guide your next action in that context — including market conditions.
So no, emotions aren’t ancient beasts.
They’re you.
And because they’re constructed, you can reshape them — not “fight” them.
Why do they feel so real?
Because your brain runs multiple predictive models in parallel. It creates the illusion of multiple inner selves battling — logic vs. emotion. But that conflict is just another social narrative your brain simulates to make sense of ambiguity.
Why Emotions Fail Traders so Consistenly
Reason 1: Low EQ in market context
Most traders mislabel their internal states, then act on the wrong behavioral signals.
For trading performance, low-arousal labels (calm, steady, neutral) outperform high-arousal ones (panic, urgency, FOMO). High arousal shrinks the brain’s prediction horizon and distorts risk weighting.
Reason 2: You’re predicting other people’s predictions
Even when calm, your forecast can still be wrong — because trading is the meta-game of predicting what others predict about the market.
That complexity skyrockets under emotional arousal.
Once you see all this clearly, the path forward becomes simple:
Stabilize your baseline affect
Recognize and name the emotion labels you’re constructing
Relabel them to match the actual trading context
Train price-action-based prediction to sharpen the brain’s global model
This isn’t a one-day upgrade. It’s a long arc of rewiring. And we’ll walk that arc deeper in future articles.
Final Thoughts
Realizing all this is only the first step. Your brain is so accustomed to living inside social reality that it forgets it’s doing it. We even invented an imaginary border separating “me” and the primal creature inside — a border that doesn’t exist.
But nothing needs to be rushed.
Shifting your mindset is a long game: Observe. Infer. Practice.
If this article sparked a new frame of understanding, then it marks the end of trading in guesswork — and the beginning of something structured, deliberate, and skill-based.
If these insights resonate, stay on this journey with me.
Trading is harsh, nonlinear, full of difficulty — but also endlessly fascinating. Win or lose, there’s always something to learn. I hope our paths continue to align as we move toward stable financial freedom through trading and broader market participation.
Thanks for stopping by this small corner of the internet. Truly.
