Stop Borrowing Confidence

In 2023, I started this newsletter to document my trading journey and share what I was learning as I learned it.

It’s been such a wild ride, the excitement of sharing a win, the gut-wrenching “dang, I took an L, and I also need to tell my readers I took an L,” the little breakthroughs that changed how I see a chart, and the moments where I realized I’m not even the same trader I was a few months ago.

And while I will always continue to share my personal journey, I’m also stepping more intentionally into mentoring. That means shifting my focus just a bit, a little less about me, and a little more about helping you build confidence in your own process.

One of the biggest shifts in my trading didn’t come from learning something new, it came from realizing I was borrowing confidence instead of building it. Borrowing it from a mentor’s conviction, from a group chat, from someone else being “in” a trade so it felt safer to be there too (until it didn’t).

The problem with borrowed confidence is that it disappears the moment things get uncomfortable. When price pulls back, or when the entry isn’t as clean as you expected, doubt creeps in fast because the decision wasn’t fully yours to begin with.

Real confidence comes from competence, and competence comes from doing the work yourself. Studying your setups, understanding why you’re entering, knowing where you’re wrong, and having a plan you trust enough to follow even when a trade isn’t in profit yet. That’s when execution gets cleaner, emotions quiet down, and decisions stop feeling so frantic and heavy.

Shifting from Borrowed to Owned

Here’s what that shift actually looks like in practice.

1) Write a real trading plan, not rules floating around in your head.
If you can’t clearly define your setup criteria, entry trigger, invalidation, and management rules on paper, it’s very easy to reach for outside certainty when the market gets loud.

2) Integrate the plan through repetition, not inspiration.
A plan becomes yours when you’ve studied it, practiced it, and reviewed it enough times that it starts showing up automatically under pressure.

3) Separate learning from execution.
Groups, mentors, and trade ideas are great for learning and perspective. Execution is a different lane. When it’s time to trade, your job is to follow your signal, not someone else’s.

4) Build proof with clean reps.
Confidence comes from stacking small, disciplined reps, meaning you followed your rules, managed risk, and reviewed the trade. The outcome can vary, the rep still counts.

5) Review like a coach, not a judge.
After the trade, ask: Did I follow the plan, what was the signal, what did I do well, what needs tightening. That’s how you improve without spiraling.

At the end of the day, this is the work. Not finding the perfect setup, not chasing certainty. When your strategy is truly yours, it stops living in your head (or in a million notebooks and documents), and starts living in your body. Your skill and your nervous system start to be in agreement, so decisions get quieter, execution gets cleaner, and confidence becomes something you’ve earned, not something you’ve outsourced.

Going deeper

I’m starting a small community focused on execution, accountability, and building a process you actually trust. I’m inviting five people to join free of charge for the first 90 days as I shape the format. If this sounds like something you’d benefit from, just reply to this email and tell me what you trade and what you’re hoping to improve.

This won’t be an alerts room, but I’ll share ideas and technical notes on the indices and stocks. We’ll work through building a real trading plan, an operating manual for how you trade, because you can’t truly own the information or execute consistently without one.

So cheers to a new chapter, more you, less me, and a whole lotta peace and profits!

Emanuela

P.S. You didn’t miss my SPX write up, I am just segmenting it off and will include a link to it each week. Click here to see the analysis.