Most traders who tell me their strategy stopped working have never checked whether they were running it.

Here is the test. It takes ten minutes and it is brutal.

Pull your last 30 trades. Tag each one:

A — planned setup, planned size, planned exit.

B — planned setup, but you broke size or exit.

C — not in your plan at all.

Now calculate what your P&L would have been if only the A trades existed.

Almost everyone who runs this finds the same thing: 40 to 60 percent of their volume is B and C, and the A-only P&L is positive. The edge was fine. The execution was the leak.

That changes what you should be buying. A new indicator does nothing for a B trade. What fixes a B trade is deciding the exit before entry and making it mechanical, cutting size until a full loss is boring, and having a stop-trading number you actually obey.

The four leaks that do almost all the damage:

1. Tilt — trading to discharge emotion instead of to express an edge.

2. Revenge — sizing up specifically to win back what the last trade took.

3. Fear of giving back — cutting winners early because unrealised profit feels like it can be taken from you.

4. Size creep — quietly raising risk after a good run, so one ordinary losing streak erases a month.

Here is the part nobody says: willpower will not fix any of these. "Just follow your plan" asks you to make a good decision at the exact moment you are least able to. The professionals are not stronger in the moment. They removed the moment, by deciding in advance and making the decision hard to reverse.

Run the A/B/C test tonight. If your A-only P&L is green, stop shopping for strategies. You already have one.

Most people blame retail losses on bad entries. That's rarely the real problem.

The real problem is that most traders have no defined process — they have a collection of tips from Twitter, a few indicators they half-understand, and no rule for when they're wrong.

A few things that actually move the needle once you fix them:

• Risk sizing before signal quality. A perfect setup with a 10% account risk will still blow you up eventually. Fix position sizing first — it matters more than your entry.

• A written invalidation point. If you don't know what proves your trade wrong before you enter, you'll rationalize holding a loser until it's a catastrophe.

• Journaling every trade, win or lose. Not P&L — the reasoning. Most people can't tell you why last week's winning trade actually worked.

• Fewer, higher-conviction setups. Overtrading is a symptom of not having a real filter for what qualifies as a setup.

None of this is exciting. That's exactly why most people skip it and keep losing.

Building a real system > chasing the next signal. That's the whole premise behind First Class.