Why Scaling Up Can Be Challenging

Joseph Gordon-Levitt played tightrope walker Philippe Petit in the 2015 movie “The Walk”, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

It had some breathtaking scenes of JGL tightrope-walking between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

I personally think there are two main challenges when it comes to trying to scale up in your day trading profits.

Sure, I think about scaling up all the time, but I’m also realistic enough to know that I’m still a relative newbie to this and I have a long way to go before developing a solid day trading process. I want to make sure my mental game is on point before slowly scaling up.

I’m pretty sure it’s human nature to want to think about quickly scaling up your profits the moment you start to string a few good trades together.

Who doesn’t want to grow their account fast right?

I mean, if you can string a few $500-profit type of trades together, what’s stopping you from doing the same with $50,000-profit trades right?

Apart from the limitations of your account, I can think of two reasons why scaling up can be challenging (I say “challenging” but not “impossible”):

Physical limitations: If you trade using options (like I do), then for certain stocks you might not be able to buy enough of the options that you want at that particular DTE and strike price, especially if that stock’s options has low open interest. It’s one thing to be buying 10 options at one go, and it’s another thing to be wanting to buy say 1,000 options at one go.

Emotional limitations: It’s just like tightrope walking as mentioned above. It’s one thing to be practising your walk at 10 metres off the ground. It’s a whole other thing to be doing the walk across the Twin Towers! Sure, you can tell yourself you’re doing the exact same thing, just 400 metres higher that’s all. But you start to think “What if I fall? That’s absolutely going to be the end for me. The risk is just ridiculously high!” Similarly, it’s one thing to risk $500 on a trade, and it’s a whole other thing to risk $50,000 on a trade. Your mind starts to play tricks on you. The sheer size of the risk may start to overwhelm you.

I’m not saying it is impossible to scale, but I’m just saying scaling is probably not as easy as we think it is, due to the two reasons I humbly suggest above.

I definitely want to slowly start scaling up someday, but I know I need to get my mental game all sorted before I attempt to do so.