The way most people are introduced to trading sets them up for a fundamental misunderstanding. Driven by influencers, beginners are handed a toolkit of indicators and told to act on them mechanically (sell when RSI hits 70, buy when this line crosses that one, etc). The problem is that nobody explains what these tools are actually trying to measure, or why. You end up accumulating a kind of intellectual debt: applying instruments you don't understand to problems you have never defined. What's missing is the scientific rigor that serious trading actually demands. A sound approach starts with an idea, a hypothesis about how or why price behaves the way it does. From there, you ask "how could I prove this wrong?" and then doing exactly that, as ruthlessly as possible. Most ideas will collapse at the first honest test, and that's fine. Most of your ideas will turn out to be dogshit. That's just the way it is. The chasm between these two stances is enormous, and it rarely gets addressed. Trading is a discipline of structured skepticism, and yet what is taught, for the most part, is pattern mimicry.