Your favorite trading setup is a trap.
It just hasn't sprung yet.
You’ve been sold the idea that trading is about finding a magic edge.
A pattern, an indicator, a system with a high win rate.
This is the biggest lie in the retail trading industry.
They sell you certainty because certainty sells.
But the market doesn’t deal in certainty.
It deals in probability and environments.
A so-called edge is almost always regime- dependent.
This is the concept that wrecks most accounts.
A breakout strategy prints money in a trending, high-liquidity market.
You feel like a genius buying every new high.
But when the market regime shifts to a choppy, mean-reverting environment, that same breakout strategy becomes a machine
Every breakout gets stuffed and reverses.
Your edge is now a liability.
Most traders don't see this.
When their system breaks, they think the problem is psychology.
They think they’ve lost their discipline or their nerve. So they double down.
They force trades, trying to prove their old edge still works.
They start revenge trading to make back losses. This is a fatal error.
The problem isn't in your head.
The problem is you're using a tool from a bull market in a bear market.
You are trying to use a map of New York to navigate London.
Think about a simple moving average crossover system.
For six months in a clear trend, it works.
You buy when the 20-day crosses the 50-day and ride it up.
Then the market gets choppy. Volatility expands.
Now, that same crossover signal generates nothing but whipsaws.
It gets you in at the top and out at the bottom, over and over. You didn't get dumber.
Your strategy didn't suddenly become worthless.
The environment just stopped paying for that specific approach.
Professionals don’t look for a single, universal edge.
They look to identify the current market regime.
They ask one question: what is the market paying for right now?
Is it paying for buying dips, or shorting rips?
Is it rewarding momentum, or fading extremes? An edge is not a setup.
An edge is understanding the environment you are in and adapting your strategy to it.
Everything else is just noise.