All trading books, all course instructors, and all the experiences of those who came before you are telling you: trade objectively; execute like a machine; eliminate subjective judgment; and crush your emotions in the cradle.

You heard it, and you followed along. You write a trading plan, set your stop loss and take profit, and execute discipline strictly—like an emotionless order-execution machine. What happens then? Either you can’t hold on midway through the execution, or you strictly follow it for years and the account still stays dead or stagnant.

Then you turn your head and look—of those speculative funds and top traders who truly made big money, there are hardly any who are mechanical machines that follow rules blindly. What do they rely on? It’s judgment, perception, the feel of the market—the very "feel" you scoff at the most.

Objective traders: higher odds of survival, but a locked-in ceiling

First, let’s talk about the objective trading path.

What’s the core advantage of objective trading? Two words: repeatability.

The rules are set in stone: when the conditions are met, execute. It doesn’t depend on your judgment, your state of mind, or your understanding of the market. As long as you can place a trade when you see a signal and cut your losses when you hit a stop, it works.

This path offers the highest odds of survival. Why? Because risk is controllable and you don’t have to rely on human judgment. As long as you refine your rules and master execution, you’re unlikely to suffer a catastrophic loss.

But it has one fatal flaw: your profit ceiling is locked in.

The rules are fixed, and so is how much you can earn. You can only capture the part of the market that your rules are designed to cover. When a trend comes along, your rules may only capture a portion of it; when the market moves sideways, your rules may get whipsawed back and forth.

It’s not that your rules are wrong. It’s that you can’t proactively expand your profit potential when a trend arrives, or adjust your strategy in time when market conditions shift. You can survive, but it’s hard to achieve great success.

It’s like running a fast-food franchise: standardized, repeatable, and low-risk. You can earn a steady profit, but you’ll never earn three Michelin stars.

Subjective traders: lower odds of survival, but no ceiling

Now let’s talk about the subjective trading path.

Many people are biased against subjective trading and think it’s just blindly trading on gut feeling. That’s not true. The core of subjective trading is judgment, not feeling.

But you have to admit that subjective trading has a very obvious disadvantage: it isn’t repeatable.

It depends on your judgment, your state of mind, and your understanding of the market. It’s inconsistent, can’t be standardized, and can’t be mass-produced. When you’re in good form, you might make ten good trades in a row; the next day, when you’re off your game, you might make five bad trades in a row.

There’s another, less obvious pain point: your decision-making process can’t be validated through backtesting.

An objective trader can run a strategy on historical data to test whether its rules are effective. But a subjective trader makes real-time judgments about the market as it unfolds. Those judgments can’t be backtested, because your state of mind and the decision-making environment are different during a backtest. Looking at a market move that has already played out is completely different from facing uncertainty in real time.

So yes, people who trade subjectively are more likely to lose money. That’s because judgment is far less consistent than rules. Of ten people who take the subjective route, nine and a half may not make it to the end.

But the other half—the ones with strong enough judgment to consistently make good decisions—have no ceiling.

An objective trader making 50% in a year is already doing very well; subjective traders making five or ten times their money in a year is nothing unusual. The ceiling for objective traders is determined by the rules, while the ceiling for subjective traders depends only on you.

Subjective trading isn’t about gut feeling; it’s about internalized pattern recognition

We need to clear up the biggest misconception here: subjective traders don’t trade based on gut feeling.

When people hear the words "subjective trading," their first reaction is often: “Isn’t that just making it up as you go?” That’s the biggest insult to subjective traders.

The core driver of subjective traders is judgment, not feeling. Where does judgment come from? From accumulated experience and pattern recognition. It’s a quick recognition ability that develops after repeated exposure to a certain type of market.

It may look like a feeling, but it’s actually a recognition process that has become internalized in your decision-making. It’s like an experienced Chinese doctor taking someone’s pulse: they may not be able to explain why, but they just know something is wrong. It’s not a gut feeling—they’ve seen so much that it’s become muscle memory.

What’s your natural disposition? You don’t choose to be subjective or objective—it’s innate

Many people think they can choose to be either an objective or a subjective trader. In reality, you can’t.

The way you make decisions is already set before you start trading. Are you someone who makes decisions based on judgment, or based on rules? Do you tend to trust yourself, or trust a system?

These traits aren’t something you learned—they’re who you are. You can choose how to use your natural talents, but you can’t choose the talents themselves.

Your underlying way of thinking determines whether you lean more toward subjective or objective trading.

For objective traders, the decision-making process is to match technical signals to an existing rules-based framework and execute when a rule is triggered. The core action is two words: confirmation.

If a signal appears and meets the rules, trade. If it doesn’t appear or doesn’t meet the rules, wait. There’s nothing to discuss and nothing to hesitate over.

For subjective traders, technical signals are inputs. They then use their own judgment to decide how to act on those signals. The core action is also two words: making a judgment.

The same signal can lead to completely different decisions in different market conditions, at different price levels, and amid different emotional dynamics. A signal is a reference, not a command.

Put simply: objective traders treat signals as triggers; subjective traders treat them as information to consider.

Your path isn’t found in other people’s experience; it’s in your trading records. It’s already there. You just need to look back, recognize it, and keep following it.

Your natural disposition determines your path, and your path determines your method. A method can only ever serve you; it can’t walk the path for you.

Once you’ve identified your natural disposition, you’ll know how to follow the right path.

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