I don't understand why you can't just buy when it's low and sell when it's high. Why do you have to set stop loss before a trade and wait? I'm just not getting it.

Hail, champions! Unless you've been living in a cave, you're at least somewhat familiar with The Lord of the Rings—the epic tale of heroes and villains centered around a piece of jewelry: The One Ring. This ring amplifies weaknesses, twists intentions, and brutally reveals the true nature of whoever wields it. The stories of those who wear the Ring, including Frodo, Gollum, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Boromir, are about the same experience: the witching process. A few pass the test, but most fail. Sound familiar yet? In our day trading realm, we are all secretly navigating our own version of that very same process. Everyone who enters day trading starts innocent enough: excited, confident, and hopeful. But it doesn't take long for the ins and outs of the markets to corrupt us, and we often don't realize it until we're already spiraling. And there is where we lose most of our friends and colleagues, disappearing into the "unseen world". What happened here? It turned out that we just weren't prepared for the nearly impossible task of resisting temptation and maintaining emotional control. All of our common flaws (like haste and fear of missing out) seemed only minor, as if we could control and overcome those, no problem. We're all adults, so we all have that strong emotional maturity, right? Well just like Gollum, Boromir, and the nine Ringwraiths learned, we also learned we were mistaken. Only a small handful of people ever realize their weaknesses and pass the ring's test, and the same is true in day trading. My witching process is no different from yours. I began as a confident wizard, but within a month I was blowing EAs with my heart rate skyrocketing each time. I was then passing EAs but blowing PAs, blaming anything and anyone except myself. I considered abandoning the journey several times. But one day along the path, almost suddenly, I ditched most of the bad emotions that consumed my day trading. I gave up greed (I scaled down to 2 micros), the fear of missing out (I stopped brooding over trades I missed), and revenge trading (by forcing myself to log EVERYTHING I do). And then like sunlight breaking through a wall of clouds, I passed the test, just like Galadriel.