The Six Saboteurs — MindTradr
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The Six Saboteurs
The hidden patterns that cost you money — and how to make them visible.
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- Six chapters, one per archetype
- Self-assessment and shadow map
- The 30-Day Protocol
- Bias Field Guide — ten biases
- Worksheets and field tests
- Glossary and further reading
The setup was fine. You weren't.
That sentence is the whole thesis, and if it stings, that means it landed.
Almost all trading education points at the chart — the pattern, the level, the indicator. Very little of it points at the one variable present in every trade you will ever take: you. Your sleep. Your stress. Your last loss. The specific state you were in during the two seconds between seeing the move and clicking buy.
This book is about that variable — not in a vague "mindset matters" way, but mechanically, in a way you can catch and count. Because the ways traders sabotage themselves are not infinite and they are not random. They cluster into six recurring patterns, and after enough journals, the same six keep surfacing.
The FOMO Chaser, who enters the move instead of the setup. The Revenge Trader, whose last loss places the next trade. The Negotiator, who renegotiates the plan once the trade is live. The Oversizer, whose size tracks feeling instead of edge. The Improviser, who writes the plan after the trade has started. And the Spectator, who reads the setups perfectly and never pulls the trigger.
You will have a primary. Most traders do. But under pressure each saboteur hands off to another — its shadow — and that handoff is where good months go to die.
One promise and one non-promise. The non-promise: this book will not motivate you. Motivation is a state, and states collapse under a red candle. The promise: it will make your patterns visible, and visible is the only thing that has ever reliably changed behaviour. You cannot argue with a column of tagged trades.
I lost the money meant to rebuild our flooded apartment. It started with a YouTube video about meme coins — roughly the most emotionally radioactive place a beginner can possibly start. I doubled the account in weeks. Tripled it the month after. I have rarely been so wrong about anything in my life.
What I never learned was the one thing that decides whether a trader survives: how to hold your own emotions steady when real money is moving.
I came back with one hundred dollars and the opposite priority. I stopped chasing the next 10x and started tracking the only thing I could actually control — myself. I logged every trade, first in a spreadsheet, then in one journal after another. And in every one of them the thing I needed most was missing: none of them put psychology at the centre. So I built the tool I couldn't find. It became MindTradr.
The patterns I kept meeting in my own journal became the six you're about to read.
— Karolina Maya Bergman
Written with psychologist Dobromiła Wrońska (MSc, SWPS University), whose master's study was the first to test the relationship between locus of control and FOMO directly. Her result was counter-intuitive: it is the people with a stronger internal sense of agency who report more fear of missing out, not less.
That finding runs as an Agency Lens through all six chapters. The saboteurs are not a failure of responsibility — they are responsibility with nowhere useful to point.