Plutux
Back to Investing 101

Investing 101

Mindset & psychology

How markets and your own head behave. Biases you cannot switch off, the difference between a bad decision and a bad outcome, and what a crowd looks like from inside it.

28 guides · Beginner friendly

News and markets6 min read

They Were Given Tomorrow's Headlines. Half of Them Still Lost

The cleanest experiment in this whole section: give people a crystal ball and watch them lose money anyway. It settles two arguments at once — what news is worth, and what actually separates a professional from you.

Based on a clip by @TheEconomist YouTube

Read guide

Getting started9 min read

Trading vs Investing — The Line Is Not the Holding Period

Two words used as if they described different assets, when they describe different intents. The distinction that survives scrutiny is not how long you hold — it is whether your return depends on the business or on the next person's price.

Based on a clip by @ThePlainBagel YouTube

Read guide

Experience8 min read

An Ex-Goldman Trader on Starting Out — Three Lines Worth Keeping

Twelve minutes of career story with three operational sentences buried in it: you learn nothing until you have a position, volatility is the raw material, and the track record is the credential.

Based on a clip by @InstituteofTrading YouTube

Read guide

Trader interview8 min read

A Wall Street Trader on the Work Behind Consistency — No Magic Bullet

The interview's strongest lesson is about effort allocation: trading improves when you collect feedback, protect your time and build a routine you can sustain. Copying the visible habits without the review underneath is just theatre.

Based on a clip by @BTheTrader87 YouTube

Read guide

Trader interview6 min read

A Successful Trader on the Work Nobody Can Copy

The interview separates the visible part of trading — patterns and setups — from the less visible work: focus, discipline, repetition and staying with a plan through ordinary days.

Based on a clip by @MoneyShow YouTube

Read guide

Psychology7 min read

The Five Stages of a Trader — A Useful Map With Invented Numbers

Gambler, learner, survivor, enlightened, capitalist. The transitions between them are recognisable and worth knowing. The 90%, 70%, 10% and 2% sprinkled through the video are not evidence.

Based on a clip by @StickTraderMind YouTube

Read guide

Expectations5 min read

What a $100 Account Can Actually Pay For

A very good month on a hundred dollars is ten dollars. That number is not the problem — the goal you attached to it is, because there is only one way to reach a car from here.

Based on a clip by @clifford_cheqona TikTok

Read guide

Trader experience6 min read

What Blowing Up Accounts Teaches You — Capital Is Not Skill

The speaker's experience is a useful warning against treating a funded account as proof of readiness. Money made the mistakes larger; only discipline, smaller risk and deliberate practice changed the path.

Based on a clip by @precisiontrader_ TikTok

Read guide

Mindset8 min read

Mr. Market and Margin of Safety, Explained for Beginners

Benjamin Graham gave beginners two tools that still work: a mental model for price swings, and a discipline that survives being wrong. Here is how to use both without reading 600 pages first.

Based on The Intelligent InvestorBenjamin Graham

Read guide

Judgement8 min read

Second-Level Thinking: Why a Good Company Is Not a Good Buy

"It's a great company, so I bought it" is a complete thought for a customer and half a thought for an investor. Howard Marks explains what the other half is, and why risk cannot be read off a price chart.

Based on The Most Important ThingHoward Marks

Read guide

Psychology9 min read

The Four Biases That Cost Beginners the Most Money

You cannot debias yourself by resolving to be more rational — that is the finding, not a failure of effort. What works is changing the conditions under which you decide. Here are four biases and the countermeasure for each.

Based on Thinking, Fast and SlowDaniel Kahneman

Read guide

Psychology9 min read

Mental Accounting: Why the Same Money Buys Different Decisions

Money is fungible; your brain refuses to treat it that way. Three consequences of that refusal show up in almost every brokerage account, and all three have the same fix.

Based on MisbehavingRichard H. Thaler

Read guide

Psychology6 min read

The Trade After the Loss Is the One That Costs You

Accounts are rarely destroyed by one bad trade. They are destroyed by what comes next: bigger size, a setup you would normally skip, and a decision made in the ten minutes when you are least able to make it.

Based on a clip by @echoesofwallst TikTok

Read guide

Psychology6 min read

Watching Every Tick Is Not Analysis

Once the stop and the target are placed, there are only two things you can do next. One of them is patience. The other one has a name, and it is not risk management.

Based on a clip by @echoesofwallst TikTok

Read guide

Psychology10 min read

Thinking in Probabilities: What the Trader Mindset Talk Gets Right, and Where It Overreaches

A finance lecturer's talk on how successful traders think: flat affect, mechanical routine, probability rather than certainty, and clarity in place of positivity. Two of those ideas are load-bearing. One of them, taken literally, will cost you money.

Based on a clip by @TEDx YouTube

Read guide

Psychology7 min read

Five Trading Psychology Rules — Build the Process Before You Chase the Profit

The useful lesson is not to feel less. It is to make fewer decisions while your feelings are loud: write the setup, define the risk, and let one tested process do the work.

Based on a clip by @TheMovingAverage YouTube

Read guide

Psychology7 min read

Trading Psychology Is an Environment Problem — Make Good Decisions Easier

Rayner Teo's short lesson moves trading psychology out of the motivational-poster category: change the pressure around the trade, score rule-following, and judge the method over a sample.

Based on a clip by @tradingwithrayner YouTube

Read guide

Trader experience7 min read

Nine Trading Psychology Lessons in Plain English — Think in Samples, Not Single Trades

Jdun Trades' nine-minute recap is strongest when reduced to one habit: stop letting the last trade make the next decision. Use a sample, a journal and a fixed risk rule.

Based on a clip by @JdunTrades YouTube

Read guide

Trading psychology6 min read

Seven Trading Behaviour Leaks to Catch Before They Cost You

The clip uses seven “deadly sins” as a memorable label for common trading mistakes. Keep the memorable list, drop the moral judgement, and turn each leak into a behaviour you can observe and stop.

Based on a clip by @erostrades TikTok

Read guide

Psychology9 min read

The Four Fears That Break a Perfectly Good Plan

Nearly everyone who abandons a rule can name the moment but not the reason. There are only four reasons, and each one attacks a different clause of the plan.

Based on Trading in the ZoneMark Douglas

Read guide

Discipline6 min read

A Daily Profit Target Makes You Take Worse Trades

Setting a daily dollar goal feels like discipline. It is the opposite: it hands the trade-selection decision to a clock and a number that the market never agreed to.

Based on a clip by @jduntrades YouTube

Read guide

Psychology8 min read

Six Things to Stop Doing — Getting Better by Subtraction

Counting the profit before you enter, hopping strategies, hunting tops and bottoms, swinging for home runs, setting profit goals, copying alerts. Six habits, each one removable this week.

Based on a clip by @UmarAshraf28 YouTube

Read guide

Judgement9 min read

Resulting: Why a Winning Trade Is Not Proof of a Good Decision

The habit of working backwards from how a trade turned out has a name, and it is the reason experience does not automatically make people better investors. Here is the alternative.

Based on Thinking in BetsAnnie Duke

Read guide

Psychology7 min read

“I Learned Nothing for Four Years” — What Turns a Loss Into a Lesson

Fund the account, lose it, top it back up, repeat. Years pass and nothing accumulates. The switch is not a new technique; it is being willing to read your own record.

Based on a clip by @TraderTomTube YouTube

Read guide

Track records6 min read

An 18-Year-Old Making $15,000 a Week — What Five Good Months Prove

Five profitable months is about a hundred trading days. The study everyone quotes at day traders only starts counting people at three hundred. That gap is the whole argument.

Based on a clip by @george.kamel TikTok

Read guide

Judgement9 min read

A Good Track Record Is Not Evidence of Skill

Run enough people through a random process and some of them finish with spotless records. They will have explanations. So will you, about your own results.

Based on Fooled by RandomnessNassim Nicholas Taleb

Read guide

Market history10 min read

The Anatomy of a Bubble: Five Stages That Keep Repeating

Manias are not random. They follow a sequence that historians have documented since the 1630s, they run on credit rather than enthusiasm, and the top is always defended with the same sentence.

Based on Manias, Panics, and CrashesCharles P. Kindleberger

Read guide

Crashes7 min read

What to Do When the Market Drops

Down years are a feature of owning stocks, not evidence something has broken. What makes them dangerous is the story attached to them.

Based on a clip by @BenFelixCSI YouTube

Read guide

Learning paths that use these guides

Reading about a system is not having one.

Plutux is where you write your rules down, test them against real data, and keep the record your memory would otherwise rewrite. Join the waitlist for early access.

Plutux is not an investment adviser. Market data and AI-generated analysis are for information and education only, not investment advice. Disclaimer

© Plutux Technology Limited 2026
Investing Psychology Guides: Bias, Emotion and Decision Quality | Plutux