Have you ever experienced that feeling where you're halfway through a conversation and just want to hang up?

You excitedly talk about how amazing the starry sky was last night, and the other person coldly responds, "The mosquitoes were unbearable." You marvel at the vastness of the ocean, and they reply, "Do you know how many people drown every year?" This kind of conversation isn’t about having different interests—if you like reading and they like hiking, that’s just having your own preferences. What’s truly suffocating is when your fundamental ways of seeing the world are completely at odds.

The rules for adult relationships are simple: filter, don’t educate. Prejudice is like a mountain—you’re not obliged to be the Foolish Old Man moving it.

Apply this logic to trading, and it immediately makes sense.

Some are addicted to the thrill of bottom-fishing, others swear by the safety of trend-following—these aren’t real differences in worldview, at most they’re just style preferences. You manage your positions for stability, he goes all in for high risk, which is just a difference in risk tolerance. But when you talk about these things—

You treat risk management as your lifeline, he thinks holding losing trades is what makes you tough. You say stop-loss is the golden rule for preserving capital, he calls you a coward for thinking like that. You look for patterns of probability resonance in candlesticks, he’s convinced the market is all manipulated by big players. You believe in discipline and review, he relies on intuition and insider tips—this is the real cognitive gap in the trading world.

But it gets even better: you miss out on a rally because you strictly follow your rules and sleep soundly; he misses it and blames the market for not giving him a chance, resenting everyone for affecting his profits. When his account drops 10%, you see it as a normal drawdown and keep holding, he panics, cuts his losses, and chases the highs. You say making money comes from a closed cognitive loop and system iteration, he says it’s all about having the latest inside information.

The real incompatibility in trading isn’t about which technical indicator to use or how much to position—it’s a fundamental divergence in understanding the nature of the market, a world of difference in trading psychology maturity.

People like this—let the market teach them.