How to Get Out of a Trading Rut

I had a call with my lifetime subscribers recently and one of them asked how to get out of a trading rut. I couldn’t answer it properly on the call because it’s not the kind of thing you can compress into a few minutes - so I thought I’d write a brief post on it.

I’ve managed money through multiple cycles now, across different volatility regimes and asset classes, and I can tell you with certainty that ruts do not discriminate by experience level. I’ve watched guys with 20 years in the industry go through stretches where nothing works. And I’d been there myself more times than I’d like to admit. The difference isn’t whether you hit these periods as you will, it’s whether you have a framework for recognising them early and extracting yourself efficiently. Because here’s what matters when you’re running real capital… the cost of a rut isn’t just P&L, it’s the opportunity cost of being mentally unavailable when the actual setup finally arrives. You can’t afford to spend three months in repair mode when the market is handing you exactly the kind of environment you’re built to profit from.

Every one of us eventually hits that point where the market stops responding to you, and the internal rhythm that once felt effortless suddenly feels completely foreign. It’s never just one bad trade, it’s the slow accumulation of small hesitations, rushed decisions, sloppy sizing, unnecessary risk, and the constant sense that you’re half a step behind everything you’re looking at. A rut isn’t a technical problem, and it’s not a you’ve lost your mojo problem either. It’s purely a moment where your internal state becomes misaligned with the market’s tempo, and instead of acknowledging it, you try to push through it, trading as if nothing has changed. That’s how you make it worse. And the only way out is to stop pretending you can brute-force your way back to competence.

I think that the first real step is accepting that you need to reduce pressure, not increase it. Most people try to trade themselves out of a rut, almost trying to magically reset their confidence, when in reality the only thing that restores control is cutting size and slowing the whole thing down. If you’re trading with the same size you use when you’re seeing the ball clearly, you’re already making the mistake. Size creates psychological problems. In a rut, it drags you further off-centre. The quickest path back to clarity is to trade with size so small that you almost don’t care about the PnL - because you’re trying to regain momentum, not money. And here’s the thing nobody tells you: when you cut size during a rut, it often reveals how much of your recent trading was driven by ego rather than edge. If you find yourself resisting smaller size because it feels beneath you or because you’re embarrassed by how little you’ll make, that’s confirmation you needed to cut it.

Once you’ve cut the emotional load, reset your inputs. All of them. Every rut I’ve seen (mine included) gets amplified by noise. Too much scrolling, too many conflicting opinions, way too much chart-staring and reacting to every fucking wiggle. When you’re trading well, your inputs are clean, stable, and consistent. When you’re in a rut, you consume information like someone trying to escape a burning building, hoping something you read will give you certainty. It won’t. You get out of the rut by returning to the strategy that actually built your confidence in the first place. Your mental environment needs to become quiet again before your execution can work again.

One of the biggest traps during a rut is the shift toward PnL-driven decision-making. You start thinking in terms of making back the last loss or getting the month/quarter/year green, and your whole perspective collapses. That’s when you begin forcing trades, cutting winners too early, holding losers too long, and doing everything from a place of fear rather than intentionally. The only way out is to pivot entirely back to process. PnL is a trailing indicator, it reflects the quality of what you were doing days or weeks ago. Process is the leading indicator, the only thing that can change your trajectory. A rut ends not when you get a big green day, but when you execute a clean, unforced trade that reminds you what competent behaviour feels like.

You need to slow your time horizon down. Most ruts come from a mismatch between the market’s pace and your internal pace. Maybe the market has shifted into a grind at the exact moment you’ve become impatient. Maybe volatility has collapsed but your expectations haven’t. Maybe you’ve been running too hot in your personal life and trying to trade at the old tempo when you’re mentally not even close. When you’re out of sync, your ability to see clean setups just deteriorates. So take fewer trades and let the market come to you again. Re-align your tempo with the environment before attempting anything ambitious.

But the truth is this: almost every rut starts outside the charts. Stress, sleep deprivation, personal conflict, burnout, boredom, FOMO, an unresolved loss… these are the real culprits. Trading amplifies whatever you bring into it. If you haven’t been honest about what’s going on in your life, the market will expose it. I don’t think you can fix a rut if you can’t name its trigger. I went through a difficult stretch in late 2023 where I couldn’t read markets properly for several weeks after having been right all year. Every instinct I had was wrong. The only thing that pulled me out was forcing myself to step back from the screens entirely. Same thing happened earlier this year during the selloff. Some people would’ve said I was crazy for cutting so many positions when I did, but managing that downside gave me the chance to dump what I least loved. When I re-allocated, I could see through the noise and bought names that returned far more than the names that I’d cut once we bounced back.

During the recovery phase, rules need to replace instinct. When you’re trading well, instinct feels reliable because it’s built on thousands of small data points your brain has quietly processed. In a rut, instinct is corrupted. You’re acting from emotion, not pattern recognition. You need strict rules on size, frequency, stops, time of day, how many losing trades you allow before stepping away.

And once you find your footing again, the thing that truly ends the rut isn’t some huge win, it’s a single clean, well-executed trade that might barely move the needle financially but restores the identity you temporarily lost.

The final and most important step is extracting the lesson. A rut doesn’t mean you’re failing… it’s just evidence that you’ve hit a point where your current process no longer perfectly fits your current environment. It’s a signal that some part of your system has loosened or drifted, and now the market is basically forcing you to tighten the bolts. The worst thing you can do is treat it as an anomaly and move on without reflection.

Everybody involved with markets experiences a rut of some sort and the difference between retail and professionals is not who avoids them, it’s just who knows how to navigate them. A rut isn’t the end of anything. It’s usually the clearing event before the next real leg higher in your development and performance. And if you approach it correctly you come out much more profitable and confident.

Fed