1. Stop conditions are plan conditions
A complete trading plan contains its own termination clause: a maximum drawdown (e.g. -20% from the high-water mark), a time box (a losing quarter triggers a full review), and behavioural triggers (the journal shows N consecutive rule-breaks). These are not pessimism - they are the same logic as the stop-loss, applied to the account and the person.
2. The behavioural red flags
The warning signs in the data: trading longer hours for worse results; checking the phone at night; sizes creeping outside the formula; the journal going quiet (violations nobody wants to write); borrowing to trade or "temporarily" dipping into money that had other jobs; hiding results from a partner. Each one alone deserves a pause. The honest test: if a friend showed you their last month as a journal, what would you tell them?
Remember: A break is not a defeat - it is a position: flat, with the ability to re-enter deliberately. The market has no expiry date; your capital does.
3. The cool-down protocol
The cheapest risk tool ever invented: when a trigger fires, withdraw a portion (or all) to a place that cannot be traded, take the defined break (2 weeks minimum after a -15% month), and return only with a written re-entry plan - what has changed, what size, which rules. Deciding to continue trading is itself a trade; it deserves a setup, too.
4. The re-entry rule
Coming back is allowed - with conditions: the drawdown cause identified in the journal (bad luck vs. regime change vs. execution), sizing resumed at half, and a defined review window. What is not acceptable is the 48-hour emotional re-entry at full size - that is the revenge pattern wearing a recovery costume.
5. When this fails
Stop-logic fails exactly once, and it fails hard: when the money being traded was never risk-capital. Rent money, borrowed money, family money - no psychological framework survives that pressure, and none should have to. If that is the situation, the correct trade is exit-to-stable, and the correct time is now, before the next streak.
Risk: Trading with money you cannot afford to lose converts every normal drawdown into a life event. No strategy in this book - or any book - is designed for that situation. Exiting to safety is the trade.