*Originally published in French on objectifeco.com, September 25, 2010. The site was purged in 2016; this text survives only in the Internet Archive. Snapshot. Translated, not rewritten: what follows is the original argument as it was made, including what time has since proven wrong. Where that happens, you'll find a note from the desk, dated 2026.*
I've said it often elsewhere: what strikes me most, watching all the traders I get to observe, is the glaring absence of the winning trade. I'm not talking, of course, about the trades that bring in €3. Whatever the size of the account, it's rare, even very rare, to see gains above 1% of the account.
Set the bar at 2%, and then it's really something…
Sure, the majority of traders work counter-trend, and that already explains part of this bias, since the technique isn't suited to producing big gains.
And yet that's exactly where the key to success in trading lies.
The financial markets carry an element of chance that we will never be able to master. If your technique doesn't give you the chance of landing a big gain, time is working against you.
These accidents, these events that weren't supposed to happen but that will happen, inevitably, in a trader's life: your trading account will only be able to digest them if, over the long run, you also have the presence of "positive accidents", those significant gains that give you a genuine mathematical expectation of winning.
Without that, you're only postponing the reckoning. You're fighting to survive, but you're not giving yourself the means to actually succeed at trading.
Related. Who's Capable of Holding a Position Like That? and Knowing How to Get Out of the Market. Background: take-profit order in the Ouinex glossary.
About the author. Samuel Rondot has traded financial markets since 1995 and is self-taught. He wrote a book on technical analysis, published a long run of trading columns between 2009 and 2016, and now runs the algorithmic trading desk at Ouinex.
Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss.
