Stop hoping and stop wishing you had magically known what to do in the past and start following your trading plan 100% in the present. The clarity of a past historical chart is 20/20 but that has nothing to do with the real time chart that abruptly stops giving you information on the far right edge and leaves you with the unknown future. Hindsight can only teach lessons, it is a waste of energy to use it for second guessing. Hopefully you were trading your plan based on your system so your actions in the past were based on discipline. If you were following your plan then you should have no regrets maybe just ideas on how to tweak your system for a little better entry or exit after doing some more chart studies and back tests. If you did not follow your trading plan then you could have some regret about a loss of discipline that caused you to not take an entry, exit, or not trade with the right position sizing. The only regret a trader should carry is a loss of discipline.
Hindsight can be one big trip into delusion. In the past you always did exactly what you were going to do for where you were in your trading journey. You did the best you could if you were giving your best effort. If you were not giving your best effort at research and focus then you can regret being lazy but what was done is done. You can get bitter or you can get better but you can’t change your past behavior. You can only do what you need to do to improve your future behavior. Learn where your weaknesses are and work harder on improving them. Stop repeating the same mistakes. Trade too big once for a big loss shame on you, do it ten times in a row and trading may not be for you. The biggest perspective that you have to gain from the past is learning about your own weaknesses and making the needed adjustments so the trend of bad trading ends there and the future belongs to better decisions and the path to success.
Hindsight is a classroom for learning what to do differently in the future not a place to emotionally time travel to and second guess your past actions. Your energy is best spent in trading the current market action correctly not pondering what you should have done in yesterday’s market. If that trade happened over again in the past the exact same way with you being the same trader at the same place in your trading journey you would have done the exact same thing. So let’s put that behind us and change the channel from your own personal history channel to your own current news events. You can’t relive the past all you can do is learn from it. Forgive your past self that didn’t have the luxury of your current knowledge, then go forward and sin no more.
