When I look back at my trading journey, it feels less like a straight road and more like a rough trek through mountains, rivers, and confusing crossroads. I didn’t come into trading as a teenager or college kid with starry dreams of getting rich quick. I had already worked nine years in service before I made the leap. Maybe that’s why I never had the “thrill-seeker” mindset of gambling on tips or chasing late entries.
From the very beginning, I was searching for something different: a mechanical system that would tell me exactly when to buy or sell. No tips, no gurus, no vague gut feeling. Just rules. But the journey to build that wasn’t straightforward. It was messy, frustrating, and at times boring. And the only reason I could stick through it was because of how I slowly reshaped the way I learned, tested, and tracked myself — with a big help from TradingView tools.
This is my story.
Suggested Read: What Makes Trading So Hard? My 4-Year Journey Through Pain, Phases, and Discipline
Phase 1: The Gut Feeling Years
In the first three years of trading, I’ll be honest: I was blind. I thought I was doing technical analysis, but in reality, I was trading gut feelings dressed up as analysis.
Here’s how it looked:
I’d spot something on the chart — let’s say, the price hits the previous high and rejects sharply. My brain would start narrating: “Ah, look! Buyers came late, they’ll be trapped now, they’ll exit, and new sellers will enter. A massive drop is coming!”
Sounds convincing, right? But here’s the trap — I never backtested this properly. It was just a hypothesis floating in my head. If you, the reader, were to take a short trade immediately after reading my logic, you’d probably end up overtrading too. Because it’s not tested, it’s not proven.
At that time, overtrading for me didn’t mean revenge trading or FOMO trades. My definition was different:
👉 Overtrading = Taking trades that were never tested, never part of a plan.
This realization hit me hard later, but during those years, I was just spinning in circles.
Phase 2: The Boring Journal I Hated
Everyone says, “Keep a journal.” I didn’t.
For three years, I found the idea of writing things in a diary boring and useless. I thought: What’s the point? I already know what mistake I made — why write it down?
But here’s what actually happened: I kept repeating the same mistakes. Because I never had a system to look back and see patterns in my behavior or setups.
Eventually, I decided to change my approach. Instead of a diary, I shifted to something more visual:
- I started keeping an Excel sheet of trades.
- Alongside it, I saved chart screenshots for every trade.
And here’s the surprising part: when I looked back at those charts even months later, I could still recall exactly what I was thinking during the trade. That felt powerful. It was like talking to my past self.
Suggested Read: TradingView Chart Basics: Candlestick Types, Timeframes & Multi-Chart Layouts for Beginners
Mini Story 1: My First “Ah-Ha” with Screenshots
I remember one particular trade on a volatile stock. At that moment, I thought the setup was perfect. But when I pulled up the screenshot two months later, I could clearly see my entry was late, my stop was misplaced, and my reasoning was full of holes.
That hit me differently than just writing “bad entry” in a diary. The visual pain of seeing it on the chart made the lesson stick.
That’s when journaling finally became useful — not because of discipline, but because it gave me memory with proof.
Phase 3: Building a Mechanical System
Slowly, I realized trading can’t be about daily emotions. For me, it had to be treated like a business.
That meant two things:
- No caring about individual trades — win or loss.
- Focusing on longer horizons — month, quarter, year.
I stopped tracking my emotions trade by trade. Why? Because my system was getting stricter and stricter with specific criteria. When you have rules so clear that they leave no room for “gut feelings,” there’s no need to fear FOMO, revenge trading, or random overtrading.
For example, my system became so mechanical that:
- If stop loss hit, no emotions.
- If profit booked, no excitement.
- Just numbers in a longer report.
It felt freeing.
Mini Story 2: The Stop Loss That Didn’t Hurt
I once took a textbook setup — everything lined up. But it hit stop loss within 10 minutes. Old me would have felt stupid. New me shrugged and said: “Good trade, wrong outcome.”
Because the focus was now not this trade but 100 such trades over time. That’s business thinking.
Suggested Read: How I Use Pivot Points on TradingView Charts
Phase 4: Enter TradingView — My Silent Partner
This is where TradingView entered my story in a serious way.
Until now, my learning was scattered — gut feelings, screenshots, Excel, half-formed systems. TradingView gave me the tools to bring everything together into a process.
Here’s how:
- Backtesting on Pine Script
- Earlier, I would just assume something worked. With TradingView, I learned to code my ideas into Pine Script and actually backtest them.
- For example, my theory about “price rejecting at previous high” could be tested over hundreds of days instead of me guessing.
- Multi-Timeframe Charting
- I could pull up multiple timeframes side by side and see if my setups had consistency.
- No more confusion about “maybe it works on 5-min but not on 15-min.”
- Annotation and Replay Mode
- Replay mode became a lifesaver. Instead of guessing how price might have moved, I could re-live past sessions and test my reactions.
- This also made journaling more interactive.
- Community and Scripts
- I discovered I wasn’t alone. Many traders shared open-source scripts. I could study, tweak, and improve them to fit my edge.
Mini Story 3: The Day Backtesting Changed My Mind
One day, I coded my favorite setup — the “rejection at previous high” short — into Pine Script. Honestly, I was confident it would show massive profits.
The result? It was barely breakeven over 6 months.
That was humbling. But instead of giving up, I started tweaking rules: adding volume filters, timing restrictions, risk-reward logic. Slowly, the system improved.
Without TradingView, I would still be blindly believing in that setup.
Phase 5: The Bigger Picture
Now, when I look at my trading, it feels like a business with proper reporting. I don’t worry about daily results. I look at monthly green or red, quarterly progress, yearly growth.
TradingView became less of a “charting platform” and more of a partner in accountability:
- Journaling with screenshots + annotations.
- Testing with Pine Script.
- Tracking with alerts and reports.
It turned the boring, frustrating part of trading into something I could actually engage with.
Conclusion: Lessons for New Traders
If you’re new to trading, here’s what my journey taught me:
- Don’t trade gut feelings. Test everything.
- Journaling is non-negotiable. But make it visual — charts and screenshots beat diaries.
- Think business, not daily gambling. Focus on quarters and years.
- Use tools smartly. Platforms like TradingView can save you years of wasted effort.
- Detach emotions. A good trade can lose money, a bad trade can win money — only the system matters.
For me, the real edge wasn’t a magic indicator. It was the shift from chaos to process. From gut to rules. From guessing to testing.
And TradingView was the bridge that made it possible.
Suggested Read: TradingView Review 2025: Why I Still Use It After 5 Years as a Full-Time Trader
