Ok fair enough, that is a good reply - maybe I was too critical. The fact that you didn't reply defensively is a good sign (and a rare response) and means you can be honest with yourself and think logically. And if you had two good runs, then you MAY be doing something right, some of the time. However, you multiplied capital so much that you probably are taking way too much risk. Also, don't think you can't go bust just because you are playing with moderate stakes for you. It's very, very easy to one day get sucked into a bad position, and then get in over your head. This is a real risk for people who aren't either Spock-like in their emotional control, or extremely experienced. I have seen a lot of 'talented' traders have decent careers for years, then blow up. So, I recommend giving someone else a bit of oversight e.g. your wife - make sure she doesn't let you feed extra cash into your trading account if you do wipe it out. Also consider using a limited liability company to place a hard legal cap on your losses. These steps may seem pedantic or excessive now, but if they are unnecessary, you won't regret having taken out that 'insurance'; and if they are necessary, they can avoid a really bad outcome. It's just like taking out fire insurance on your house, or life insurance. Another technique I always recommend to everyone, and which NO ONE ever follows, is to trade small enough that you never have any stress over any position. Don't try to make money, instead try to trade with perfect technique. E.g. if you could afford a drawdown of 50k (for example), instead trade with a max drawdown risk of 15k. Make your goal to NEVER hit that 15k loss, even if all your trades lose at once, even if you have 10 losses in a row. Then only take your best setups, on small size. See how that goes for 6 months. If you are good - you will still make some money, and you will learn a lot, and it will be relaxing. If you fuck up, your losses will be 1/3 of what they would if you traded normally. If you are good, and get the results - you can still go to full size, and in the next 5-10 years you will still become successful. If you are potentially good, but not there yet - this could make the difference between making it after some early small losers and lessons; or getting hit bad and giving up or suffering another slump. And if you suck, you save yourself a lot of money and stress. Trading is a bit zen-like in some of its paradoxes. For example, if you try to make a lot of money, usually that causes losses - you trade too big, you push too hard, you get faked out a lot on pullbacks and market tests, you take too many trades and so have more difficult decisions to make, more frequently. Whereas if you stop trying to make money, and instead try to minimise losses, trade frequency, and stress, what happens is you never get faked out (because a minor wiggle doesn't bother you, and you might even add a bit), your trade quality improves significantly, you have mainly easy decisions to make (like - this trade went right in my favour and never even came close to my stop...now I raise the stop to breakeven...hmm where should I take my nice profit?) and you are never emotionally destabilised so you can approach things rationally. Good trading is not only much more profitable it is also more relaxing and fun. However, even after quite a few years I still have to relearn that lesson from time to time myself by blundering and then being reminded by my losses and mistakes, about what not to do. Back to your issue: personally I do very well if I follow a certain trading approach - medium-term speculating, with significant trade planning, scenario analysis, and sticking religiously only to high conviction setups based on my best proven strategies, then ignoring short-term noise and only exiting on my stop or a clear exit signal. I usually do poorly if I deviate from that, and often much worse if I try to follow other approaches. What you may find is that you are good at one thing and bad at another. My recommendation is to diligently analyse every single trade during your 2 winning streaks, and during your losing streaks. See if you can see anything you did differently during the good times, versus what you did during the bad times. If it wasn't pure luck, then you should see some clear differences. Then, incorporate the positive differences into EVERY SINGLE TRADE you do in future; and ruthlessly eradicate and make impossible the mistakes. You probably won't achieve that fully at first, but it should be your goal. This will also be a good test of your trading ambition - if you can't be bothered to do this, you probably don't have sufficient drive to succeed. The difference between long-term success and failure, given sufficient base talent, is motivation, analysis of mistakes, and determination to continually improve. You're shown persistence, and a desire to improve - maybe you need to work more on reviewing your errors, and correcting them? Give it a shot anyway, and let us know how you get on.