Top Challenges Traders Have Faced This Year

 

10/4/2026 - Your struggles in trading *are* your path to growth.  What challenges you is there to change you.  Every trading struggle is highlighting what you need to do to progress.

One of the most common struggles I have heard from traders this year is the challenge of holding onto positions.  Markets have not been moving in nice, smooth trends and there has been considerable headline risk.  The trader who tries to hold onto a position for a big picture view gets whipped around and often has to exit and keep losses down before the idea can play out.  This is quite frustrating.  

What it points to in many cases is the need to develop tools for better entering and exiting trades on those shorter time frames.  As I've pointed out in the past, the opposite of a "trending" or "momentum" market is generally not a "choppy" or "untradeable" market.  The opposite of trending is cycling.  The market is trading in cycles, and many times there are multiple cycles interacting to create the feeling of choppiness.  The challenge is to use indicators/oscillators to reveal short-term peaks and valleys within the market action as guides to tactical trading.  Strategic trend following isn't working, so the key is to be nimble and tactical.

In my case, I trade stock index futures and create bars on the chart representing units of volume.  Thus, for instance, I might make each bar represent 50,000 contracts traded and I will look at where we are trading relative to moving averages of those bars.  I also have charts in front of me that are shorter-term, such as denominating the bars in 5000 contract units.  I have found that the volume-based bars normalize market activity through the trading day and produce helpful overbought/oversold signals.  Seeing how the charts based on lower volume bars are cycling is useful in finding good entry/exit points vis a vis the higher volume bars.  

Many times, we become frustrated in our trading because the meaningful patterns that are setting up in the current market are different from the patterns we're looking for.  Seeing what is happening on shorter time frames can be very useful in nimbly trading longer time periods.  Our trading challenges are there for a purpose:  to make us better by expanding/refining what we're doing.