Tales you Win, Heads you Lose

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patterson.bill

New Member
Hi,

I would like to highlight to prospective traders a book that I wrote covering the ten year trading journey I went on. The book covers the confusion experienced at the beginning of the journey, to the highs of making many thousands a days, to the lows of losing 15k in a week.

Amazon - Tales you Win, Heads you Lose - Bill Patterson.

With a trade sample size of 30,000 and >1/2 a $ trillion of notional traded there is a good lessons and tips hidden within the book.

All the best,

Bill.
 
patterson.bill said:
Hi,

I would like to highlight to prospective traders a book that I wrote covering the ten year trading journey I went on. The book covers the confusion experienced at the beginning of the journey, to the highs of making many thousands a days, to the lows of losing 15k in a week.

Amazon - Tales you Win, Heads you Lose - Bill Patterson.

With a trade sample size of 30,000 and >1/2 a $ trillion of notional traded there is a good lessons and tips hidden within the book.

All the best,

Bill.
Click to expand...
That sounds like an intense journey! What inspired you to document your trading experiences into a book, and did writing it change the way you approach trading now?
 
patterson.bill said:
Hi,

I would like to highlight to prospective traders a book that I wrote covering the ten year trading journey I went on. The book covers the confusion experienced at the beginning of the journey, to the highs of making many thousands a days, to the lows of losing 15k in a week.

Amazon - Tales you Win, Heads you Lose - Bill Patterson.

With a trade sample size of 30,000 and >1/2 a $ trillion of notional traded there is a good lessons and tips hidden within the book.

All the best,

Bill.
Click to expand...
And what are the main conclusions? Survival rate in FX is very low or something like that? But this is precisely where high returns come from!
 
I think many traders fall into that trap without realizing it. Looking back at your journey, what helped you finally recognize real edge versus something that just looked good on historical data? Was it more about data-driven validation, or did your mindset shift first?
 
this is the whole game: cap losses fast and let winners compound so your R-multiple distribution is right-skewed.
 
Had a strong start, built up decent profits, then gave back most of it in one bad drawdown because of overleveraging and emotions. That loss taught me more than the winning period. Now focusing on smaller size and strict risk rules. Slowly rebuilding.
 
People focus so much on being right that they forget the real game is controlling what happens when they’re wrong. A system can survive a low win rate, but it can’t survive oversized losses and emotional averaging
 
ullrich said:
People focus so much on being right that they forget the real game is controlling what happens when they’re wrong. A system can survive a low win rate, but it can’t survive oversized losses and emotional averaging
Click to expand...
I still make mistakes, but they’re smaller and easier to come back from. That shift in how I think about risk has helped me more than anything else.
 
How do you separate the feeling of 'I need to make money back' from your actual trading decisions?
 
That’s the thing with a trading journal: the result of one trade says almost nothing, but repeated execution errors say a lot. A winner taken outside the plan can be worse for your development than a clean, properly managed loss
 
This title honestly feels too accurate Sometimes after a few good trades, confidence quietly turns into overconfidence. I try to remind myself that one winning streak does not mean every next setup deserves a trade.
 
That’s the frustrating part of trading: judging decisions only by the outcome teaches the wrong lessons. A bad entry can win and a well-executed setup can lose, so the journal has to track whether the process was correct
 
When you review your journal, what usually shows up first as the real problem — poor entries, or the decisions made after the first loss of the day?
 
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