I've watched more accounts get destroyed by bad risk management than bad analysis. Here's the rule that fixes most of it:

Never risk more than 1-2% of your account on a single trade.

Sounds obvious. Almost nobody actually does it. Here's why it matters more than your entry:

Say you have a $10,000 account and you risk 10% per trade ($1,000). Hit 5 losers in a row — completely normal in any strategy, even a good one — and you're down to roughly $5,900. Now you need a 70%+ gain just to get back to even. Most traders never recover from that hole, not because their strategy was wrong, but because the math turned against them.

Now run the same 5-loss streak risking 1% ($100 per trade). You're down to about $9,510. A rough week, not a career-ending one.

Position sizing doesn't feel exciting. It won't make a good screenshot. But it's the difference between a bad month and getting blown out completely. Fix your position size before you fix your entries — the entries matter a lot less than people think.

Built this into a full lesson (with the exact math and position sizing formulas) inside Apex Trading Lab if anyone wants to go deeper.