Misread the candlestick patterns for 6 months before a friend pointed out I had the chart upside down

I was bragging to my buddy about catching a "bearish reversal" and he just stared at me until I realized the green and red bars were reversed on my platform... has anyone else made a dumb rookie mistake that long without realizing it?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kevin9d ago

You're looking at it wrong honestly. Having the chart upside down might have actually saved you from losing money since you were accidentally trading against the trend. If you had it right side up you probably would have bought when you should have sold and vice versa. Six months of upside down trading probably taught you more about risk management than any properly viewed chart ever could. Maybe the real mistake was your friend correcting you instead of letting you keep that reverse strategy working.

elliotjenkins9d ago

Wait, did your friend ever explain why your platform had the colors swapped, or did you just have to figure that out on your own? I've been trading for years and I'm not sure I'd have caught something like that without someone pointing it out. The_kevin makes a decent point about accidentally learning risk management, but I'd be careful with that idea. Six months is a long time to be reading signals wrong, and those patterns are there for a reason even if you got lucky. Might be worth checking your current setup is actually showing green for up and red for down, because some platforms let you customize that and it's easy to forget what you changed.