Risk management is not one big decision. It's a handful of small, boring habits, repeated every single trade. None of them are exciting. All of them are what separates traders who last from traders who don't.
1. Know your max loss before you enter
Before you place a trade, know exactly what you lose if it goes fully wrong. Not roughly. Exactly. With defined-risk option spreads (like the credit spreads we write about here), this is a fixed, knowable number. If you can't say that number out loud before entering, you're not ready to enter yet.
2. Don't add to a losing trade to "fix" it
This is one of the most common ways accounts get badly hurt. A trade goes wrong, and instead of accepting the loss, a trader adds more size to "bring down the average" or "give it room to work." Sometimes this works out. When it doesn't, it turns a manageable loss into a serious one.
3. One bad trade should never be a bad month
This comes directly from position sizing (see the previous lesson). If any single trade can meaningfully damage your month, your position size is too big, no matter how good the setup looked going in.
4. Correlation counts, not just position count
Ten different trades sound diversified. But if all ten are essentially betting on the same thing (for example, all ten benefiting only if the Nasdaq stays flat), you don't actually have ten independent risks. You have one big risk, split into ten pieces. A single sharp market move can hurt all ten at once.
5. Write down the plan before you're emotional
Decide your exit, both the profit target and the max loss point, before you enter, while you're calm. Once you're in the trade and it's moving against you, your judgement is worse, not better. The plan you made calmly is more trustworthy than the decision you'd make in the moment.