I started trading Positional Nifty Futures in January 2023. For over a year, I was consistently profitable and generated respectable returns. Everything seemed to be working well—until I made the biggest mistake of my trading journey.
In February 2024, after a strong winning phase, I doubled my position size. The market didn’t care about my confidence. A sharp drawdown wiped out almost 90% of the profits I had built over the previous year within just two months.
I stopped trading at the end of March 2024 and took a break. I resumed in July 2024, determined to follow my system with more discipline. Unfortunately, history repeated itself. Whenever I felt confident, I increased my position size inorganically, and each time my equity curve paid the price.
Today, I am still going through a drawdown that has lasted 417 days and counting. It has been a humbling reminder that markets punish overconfidence far more than they reward it.
Between January and March 2026, I also experimented with intraday trading. While the returns looked attractive, higher STT costs and the frequent triggering of trades made it mentally exhausting. My mindset was built around positional trading, and I realized that constantly reacting to intraday price movements wasn’t for me. I eventually returned to positional trading, where I feel more aligned with my personality and process.
Another turning point came in mid-January 2025, when I fully automated my trading workflow using ChatGPT and Claude. From data collection and signal generation to trade execution and journaling, almost everything became systematic. Automation removed much of the manual effort and emotional interference, allowing me to focus on my professional career while ensuring my trading system was executed consistently.
One thing trend following has taught me is this:
The real challenge isn’t finding a profitable system. It’s surviving long enough to let it work.
With a win rate of only around 40%, positional trend following constantly tests your patience, confidence, and emotional resilience.
Here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned:
- Position Sizing is Everything
My biggest losses didn’t come from a bad strategy—they came from increasing position size too aggressively after winning streaks.
Had I increased position size organically, based on capital growth rather than confidence, my equity curve would have looked completely different today.
- Mental Accounting Can Be Dangerous
Once we stop treating accumulated profits as our own hard-earned capital, we begin taking risks we would never have taken with our initial investment.
Profit is capital. It deserves the same respect as the money you started with.
- Risk Management Must Evolve with the Market
Initially, I sized my positions using the historical maximum drawdown from 11.5 years of backtested data. What I overlooked was that markets evolve.
As index levels rise over time, absolute drawdown values become less meaningful. Position sizing should be based on percentage risk, not fixed point values. Risk management must adapt as the market changes.
- Automation Reduces Human Errors
Automating my trading workflow using ChatGPT and Claude has been one of the best decisions in my trading journey.
A mechanical trading system deserves mechanical execution. Automation minimizes execution errors, removes repetitive manual work, and allows me to focus on refining the system instead of constantly operating it.
- Think Twice Before Becoming a Full-Time Trader
This may be the most important lesson.
The only reason I was able to recover mentally and resume trading after losing most of my profits was because I still had my professional career.
Without that steady income, I might have abandoned my system completely.
Unless you have a substantial financial cushion or another reliable source of household income (such as an employed spouse), think very carefully before quitting your job to trade full-time.
I’m sharing this not because I’ve mastered trading, but because I’m still learning.
If my mistakes help even one trader avoid making the same costly decisions, this post will have served its purpose.
The market doesn’t reward intelligence alone. It rewards discipline, patience, consistency, and respect for risk.