The Curse of the Almost Perfect Day
Why You Ruin Your Best Trading Days — and How to Break the Pattern
Improve Your Performance, Become a Controlled Trader:
This pie is what your brain feels like when you walk away from a session that wasn’t “perfect.” The execution was clean, you ended in red or even in green! But something inside you still wants you to go…
That craving for closure? It lives in me.
I’ve always been a restless person.
My brain never runs out of problems, things that need to be done, tasks that need to be completed…
Even when apparently everything is done - at home, at work, in trading... my brain finds a way to escape that quietness and gets into the job of searching for one more thing.
I can be sitting on the couch, watching a movie, and if it’s not engaging enough, my mind starts drifting: “What’s the real world calling me to do?”, “Is there something I forgot?”
This happens to me often. It’s one of the main reasons I meditate.
There are phases where I am consistent with my meditations… and others, though, where I get sloppy and stop. But I always come back to the same truth:
Meditation isn’t a nice-to-have for me — it’s a need.
It’s the only thing that teaches my mind to stay. To stop chasing. To just be.
I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not. But I found a way that works for me.
And I realized something along the way — most people don’t struggle with meditation because “it’s not for them.” They struggle because they’ve only tried one kind. One posture. One method. One style. And it didn’t fit.
That doesn’t mean it never will.
If any part of my story resonates with you, I’ll just say this:
Don’t give up. Try another door. There are hundreds. One of them might be the one that finally helps your mind stay.
…
Without meditation, I get swept up in a kind of compulsive doing, driven by my obsession with control, structure, and productivity. And that deep need for control has been one of my biggest life challenges that transposed perfectly to trading.
Perfectly is the right word, because it ties directly to the mindset that used to sabotage my sessions, and it still does from time to time.
It creates a mix of frustration… days I struggle to leave the charts, trades I struggle to accept… something feels incomplete.
Little did I know… it wasn’t about trading.
It was about me.
When Winning Isn’t Enough
Most traders think the problem is discipline, but the real issue behind is dopaminergic closure — the need for a satisfying emotional end.
In neuroscience terms, the brain’s mesolimbic pathway (your reward circuit) doesn’t just activate with wins — it activates with anticipated wins.
So when you’ve already won, your brain enters a dangerous state:
It wants more reward… without needing it.
This is dopamine’s dark twist: It’s not the molecule of pleasure. It’s the molecule of pursuit.
When you’re up on the day, dopamine doesn’t say: “Well done. Let’s rest.” It whispers: “Imagine how good it would feel to win even more.”
This is the moment the Almost Perfect Day is born.
In this post, you'll learn:
The neuroscience behind why you can't stop when you're already winning
How the pursuit of “just one more” turns success into sabotage
A practical way to end your trading day with control
Let’s break the pattern.