Giordano Salvatori, founder of STA · 29/10/2026 · 5 min read
It's the study of how emotions and mental habits change what you do when you have money at stake. On paper everyone knows what to do: buy with a plan, set a stop, get out when the idea doesn't hold. Then the price moves against you, your heart speeds up and the plan suddenly seems less clear.
It matters because the technical part you know after a few weeks of study. The hard part is carrying it out when a red number on the screen tells you the opposite. If you're still taking your first steps, the big picture is in the guide to mindful online trading.
It's almost always these five, and almost nobody recognises them while making them.
Beginners' practical mistakes, including the non-emotional ones, are collected in the guide to online trading for beginners.
It's a tendency studied for decades by behavioural psychology: a loss weighs, on average, about twice as much as a gain of the same size. Losing 100 euros hurts more than gaining 100 feels good.
In trading it produces two opposite and harmful effects. You keep losing positions open, because closing them turns the pain into a fact. And you close winning ones too early, because you want to lock in the pleasure before it disappears. The result is an account with many small wins and a few big losses, which is the worst possible profile. Understanding how much a loss really weighs on your account helps: we talk about it in the article on drawdown.
You don't control them, you work around them. Expecting not to feel fear is like expecting not to feel the cold. It works better to take the important decisions out of the moment when you're agitated.
Before entering, write down three things: why you're entering, where you put the stop and how much you risk. Afterwards, don't change the second and third. Set a loss limit per day and, when you reach it, close the platform. Then decide the size with a calculation, not with your mood: the position size calculator is made for this, and the full logic is in the guide to risk management. If you want to learn how to choose your stop with some method, there's stop loss: what it is and how to set it.
Yes, and it's the most boring and most useful thing of all. For each trade write down the reason for entry, your state of mind, the stop, how it ended and whether you followed the rules. After twenty trades you see patterns you couldn't see from the inside: for example that you lose more on Monday mornings, or after two wins in a row, or when you check social media before entering.
The right question isn't «did I make money?» but «did I do what I had decided?». A loss taken while following the rules is a trade done well. A gain obtained by removing the stop is a trade done badly that happened to work out.
On a demo account, but with one condition: you must behave as if the money were yours. If in demo you risk 20% per trade because «it's fake anyway», you only train bad habits. Set the rules from before, risk a small percentage and check at the end of the week how many times you followed them. How to use the demo well is explained in the guide to the free demo trading account.
Keep one honest limit in mind: the demo doesn't reproduce the anxiety of real money. It helps you build the method, not ensure you'll follow it when your own money is at stake. That's why you move to real with small amounts.
Part of STA's idea comes from here: the agents have neither fear nor haste. Ten artificial intelligence agents analyse the markets twice a day, with a debate between a Bull and a Bear that forces them to consider the opposite thesis too, and every card arrives with entry, stop and target already decided. Your funds stay in your OKX account and the history is public, losses included, with the card hashes on GitHub.
It doesn't remove risk and doesn't decide for you whether to follow a card. The DEMO is free forever, with real prices and the same cards as REAL, and it's a good place to train the rules in this article. You need an account. During the launch phase, which began on 16 October 2026, STA's fees are temporarily disabled, even in REAL; the standard price list, suspended while the launch lasts, is 18% of each day's positive net result, with no offsetting of losses.
Every card as soon as it closes, with the result and what STA learned from it. It's free and you don't need to sign up.
Follow the channelA DEMO account with virtual capital and real prices, the same cards as REAL users.
Try DEMO for free →This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Trading crypto-assets involves a high risk, including the total loss of the capital used. Numerical examples are for illustration.
Risk management in trading: how much to risk per trade, how to calculate the position and how to use a stop, with made up examples and a demo account.
Trading online with artificial intelligence: what AI can do, what it can't, how to try it on a demo account and how to spot those who promise too much.
Is trading online worth it? It depends on the costs: spread, fees, swap and slippage. What really weighs on a small account and how to do the maths first.
