The Obituary Nobody Writes
Week 17 / 2026
Nobody writes the obituary for a trading account.
There is no ceremony. No flowers. No gathering of people who knew it when it was healthy and full of promise. Just a number on a screen that keeps getting smaller until one day you stop looking at it the way you used to.
I have attended several of these. Quietly. Alone. Usually on a Sunday evening when the week is over and the damage has had time to settle into something resembling acceptance.
The account does not die all at once. That is the thing they don’t tell you. It dies in instalments. One bad decision here. One lowered standard there. One week where patience ran out three days too early and the position that should have been left alone got tinkered with at exactly the wrong moment.
Death by a thousand adjustments.
The financial industry has a word for this. Drawdown. Clean, technical, bloodless. Drawdown. As if losing a significant portion of your capital is a weather event rather than a series of choices made by a specific human being who should have known better and on some level did know better and proceeded anyway.
Drawdown is the polite version. The honest version is noisier.
The obituary if someone wrote it honestly would not blame the market. The market was just there. Doing what it does. Indifferent as always. The obituary would blame the tinkering. The impatience. The three occasions where the rules were described as guidelines because guidelines sound more flexible and flexible was what was needed that particular Tuesday.
The accounts that survive are not the ones managed by the most intelligent people in the room.
They are managed by the most stubborn ones.
Stubborn about process. Stubborn about standards. Stubborn about the difference between a setup and almost a setup even when almost is close enough to be tempting.
The obituary nobody writes is also the best possible reason to never need one written.
Follow the rules.
All of them.
Even on Tuesday.