“The trader suffering at his desk”
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In March 2015, during my second year as an FX trader, who had been actively engaged even in scalping, the Euro was declining with the momentum that led some traders to believe that the EUR/USD pair might drop below parity ($1 = €1).

At that time, without studying chart patterns properly, I took positions based on information from Twitter and other sources, and moved half of my entire assets (or thereabouts) to an FX company, putting on a sell position for the Euro/USD pair with a leverage of several hundred times (around 400 times, as far as I remember), I breath ragged with excitement.

After a fierce battle between buyers and sellers with price movements that made me mistake the 15-minute chart for the 5-minute chart, the Euro rose without breaking parity. However, I had believed in the decline from the beginning, I wasn’t prepared to cut my losses, and struggled desperately to cover the losses by repeatedly averaging down and temporary hedging, leaving a large loss position.

Before I knew it, I had been glued to the chart screen for nearly two full days, without eating or drinking anything except for about half a plate of spaghetti (the one that my wife brought me in with trepidation, worried that I might have lost my mind.)

I was so nervous from fear of losing money that I forgot about my physical exhaustion and continued to trade. Finally, I couldn’t sit in my chair any longer and found myself falling asleep on my knees next to my chair. It was pretty hellish.

However, I will never forget the feeling of freedom I felt when I gave up completely, accepted the loss, closed all positions, and stood up…. Well, even more than that, I will never forget the time when I was trapped mentally, half-crazed and half-crying over the dwindling amount of money I had in front of my eyes, trading with no hope of making any profit at all.

Eight years later, I am still able to trade because I am thorough in my “stop-loss” policy.　I know that if I don’t, the hell of that time will be waiting for me again.

I know some traders like to be in what they call a “battlefield,” but I don’t. I can say that I was too close to the market at that time. I was trying to fight in an impossible position without any strategy, and I didn’t realize it.

It was a heck of an experience for me to understand the distance between the act of trading and myself is one of the most important things in trading.

Incidentally, I was somewhat moved when they broke parity in September 2022… Well, it’s just, you know, after 7 years…