I disagree, after my first "big" win, I actually blew out! I progressed "normally" my first year...taking small gains and small losses...not really getting anywhere. On my first really "big" win, I made a substantial amount, around 5x my normal gain. After this, I tended to trade for the "home runs", and wouldn't take the smaller gains as I used to. A lot of times the market was only offering this smaller gain, but I was in "big move" mode. Only after the resulting blowup did I realize that one must be able to "sense" what the market is doing. The same setup may not always yield the same result, etc, and one has to be ready to take a trade off early if things start to change. Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but it was for me. Even today, after getting a really big gain, I now tend to try and take off for a bit, just to avoid overtrading for the next "big winner".