First accounts rarely die of exotic causes. The same eight mistakes appear in almost every post-mortem, and each one feels locally reasonable while it is being made — that is precisely why lists like this exist. Read it as a pre-mortem for your own account.
1. Oversizing — the master mistake
Leverage makes a lottery-sized position feel available, and a 5–10% risk per trade turns an ordinary losing streak into a terminal event. Oversizing also amplifies every other mistake on this list, because big positions generate the fear and hope that break rules. Fix: 1% or less per trade, computed from the stop, no exceptions during the first year. Boring is the point — you are buying enough attempts to actually learn.
2. Trading without a stop
"I'll close it if it goes against me" fails at 3am, in fast markets, and against the documented human preference for not making losses official. One unstopped trade can erase fifty disciplined ones. Fix: the stop is placed with the entry, on the server, at the invalidation level — or the trade does not exist.
3. Averaging down
Adding to a loser lowers your break-even and feels like conviction; it is actually increasing size precisely as the market disagrees with you, and it converts small planned losses into position-sized catastrophes. (Averaging down as a PLANNED, pre-sized scale-in at levels is a different, legitimate technique — the mistake is the improvised rescue.) Fix: a plan-level prohibition, journal-enforced.
4. No plan — or a plan renegotiated mid-trade
Entering on a feeling, then deciding the exit while the P&L flickers, guarantees the biases choose your exits. Fix: the one-page plan, and the habit of writing the trade's reason BEFORE clicking. If you cannot state the setup in a sentence, there is no setup.
5. Overtrading
Forty trades a week on a discretionary account is not opportunity capture; it is spread donation plus decision fatigue. The market pays for selectivity: a session with zero valid setups, traded correctly, produces zero trades. Fix: define the setups; cap trades per day; journal the boredom trades separately and price what they cost you.
6. Style-hopping and system-hopping
Three losing weeks on a valid system, abandoned for a new one found that evening — repeated quarterly. Every approach has losing stretches longer than a beginner's patience, so the hopper permanently trades everyone's drawdown and no one's recovery. Fix: a fixed evaluation window (50–100 trades) before any verdict, changes only on schedule with journal evidence.
7. Chasing and rushing news
Buying the vertical candle, or gambling the payrolls print — both are entries where the crowd is maximal, spreads are worst, and your stop sits inside the noise. Fix: the setup definition (chasing fails it) and the calendar rule (flat through red-folder events until the post-news trade is a skill you have actually practiced).
8. Treating a demo win — or an early live win — as proof
A hot month on a demo account, or a lucky first live streak, routinely triggers the deposit that oversizing then destroys. Small samples prove nothing in either direction; the market pays variance freely and skill grudgingly. Fix: judge by expectancy over real sample sizes, scale risk in steps, and treat early winnings as data still under review — because they are.
The pattern underneath
Notice what all eight share: each substitutes an emotional decision made DURING the trade for a structural decision that should have been made before it. That is why the fixes keep pointing at the same three artifacts — the sizing formula, the written plan, the journal. A beginner who adopts only those three, and trades small enough to survive their own learning curve, has already avoided the causes of most first-account deaths. The market will still charge tuition; the trick is paying it in installments you can afford.