Ernesto

thx for this share, it resonated with me more than most trading posts, perhaps because I started on August 1, 2025, almost exactly when your own journey began, and, looking at your results, we even seem to share a remarkably similar month-by-month profitability profile, which probably means that, despite trading different tickers or expressing it through different setups, we are extracting something similar from the market and experiencing many of the same emotional cycles along the way. the only thing I would try to reduce is the comparison with other traders, because from the outside we can never reconstruct the complete equation, like their starting capital, opportunity set, risk, variance, previous experience, hidden drawdowns, or simply the sequence in which favorable market conditions arrived, and their results are therefore most useful not as a ranking in which we need to locate ourselves, but as evidence of what may be possible. you honestly seem to have exactly the mindset required to continue: aware that the returns come from exposure to asymmetric and fat-tailed risk, respectful of the possibility of ruin, and still capable of operating without confusing confidence with certainty and in my experience, most of the growth in dollar terms is not unlocked by suddenly becoming ten times better, but by becoming progressively accustomed to higher temperatures, until the same water that once felt unbearably hot begins to feel normal. I understand completely what you mean about risking an identity rather than merely money, because at one point I did lose both the money and the identity I had built around being a trader, and for a while it felt as though the person I had become had disappeared with the P&L; but what I eventually discovered is that, even if you lose the identity of “the trader who made this amount,” you may replace it with a deeper and more durable one, the identity of a trader who has fallen, lived through everything that comes after the fall, and found that he still possesses the ability to climb back into the saddle and rebuild. At the end of the day , the market can take away your results and, temporarily, your confidence, but it cannot so easily take away the person capable of finding a repeatable risk premium in an extremely hostile environment, nor the knowledge that, having rebuilt yourself once, you may be capable of doing it again. we appear to be walking almost the same road at almost the same time, so I’ll be following your journey with genuine interest, and for what it’s worth, someone who has survived the first year profitably, with this degree of self-awareness, is very far from being among the worst profitable traders...he is simply standing close enough to a few extreme outliers that his own outlier result has started to look ordinary. well done, good luck for year number 2.