The Art of Trading Without Looking: Why Your PnL is Your Enemy

A lesson from the NQ and ES trenches on the most counterintuitive skill in trading.

After 11 years of trading futures, I've learned that the difference between consistently profitable traders and those who blow up their accounts isn't technical analysis, market knowledge, or even capital size. It's something far more fundamental and paradoxical: the ability to completely ignore your profit and loss while executing trades.

This concept sounds absurd to most traders. After all, isn't the whole point of trading to make money? Shouldn't we be laser-focused on our bottom line? The answer is both yes and no, and understanding this contradiction is what separates professional traders from gamblers wearing trading clothes.

The Psychological Prison of P&L Awareness

Let me paint you a picture that every futures trader will recognize. You enter a long position in NQ at 22,000 based on your analysis—clean breakout above resistance, volume confirmation, everything aligning perfectly. Your initial risk is $200 per contract, and your target is $600. Simple math, solid setup.

But then something insidious happens. You start watching your PnL. Down $50, down $100, back to even, up $150, down $75. Each fluctuation becomes a small emotional event. Your brain, designed for survival, begins interpreting these numbers as threats or rewards, triggering the same neurochemical responses our ancestors experienced when hunting or being hunted.

Here's where the amateur trader reveals themselves: they start making decisions based on these PnL fluctuations rather than their original analysis. The position moves against them by $150, and suddenly that "solid setup" becomes questionable. They exit early, taking a loss on what would have been a winning trade. Or worse, they see quick profits of $200 and grab them immediately, missing the larger move they originally identified.

This isn't a character flaw—it's human nature. But professional trading requires us to transcend human nature, not succumb to it.

The Mechanics of Emotional Interference

To understand why PnL awareness destroys trading performance, we need to examine what happens in your brain when you're watching those numbers dance. When you see red on your screen, your amygdala—the brain's alarm system—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline, the same chemicals that would help you escape a predator but absolutely devastate clear thinking.

In this heightened state, your prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational decision-making and long-term planning, becomes suppressed. You literally become less capable of executing the analysis that led you to enter the trade in the first place. It's like trying to perform surgery while someone is screaming "FIRE!" in your ear.

The green numbers aren't much better. Quick profits trigger dopamine release, creating a gambling-like high that makes you want to close the position and experience that "win" immediately. This is why so many traders cut their winners short—they're essentially addicted to the feeling of booking profits, even small ones.

Consider this: when you're focused on PnL, you're no longer trading your system or analysis. You're trading your emotions. And emotions, while valuable in many aspects of life, are terrible trading partners. They make you exit winners too early, hold losers too long, and size positions based on fear rather than calculated risk.

The Professional's Paradox

Professional traders develop what I call "selective blindness"—the ability to execute their trading plan while remaining consciously unaware of their moment-to-moment PnL. This doesn't mean being reckless or ignoring risk management. Quite the opposite. It means trusting your pre-trade analysis so completely that you can execute without the emotional interference of watching profits and losses fluctuate.

Think of it like a surgeon who doesn't constantly check their bank account while operating, or a pilot who doesn't calculate their hourly wage while landing in turbulence. The immediate financial outcome becomes irrelevant to the task at hand because they trust their training and process.

In my early trading days, I would often find myself in this pattern: identify a great setup, enter the trade, watch it move in my favor, get excited and take profits early, then watch it continue moving for what would have been a much larger win. I was literally sabotaging my best trades by being too aware of their profitability.

The breakthrough came when I started treating each trade like a single frame in a movie. One frame doesn't make or break the film, just as one trade doesn't make or break a trading career. This perspective shift allowed me to focus on execution rather than outcome, process rather than profit.

Practical Techniques for PnL Disassociation

The first technique I follow is what I will call the "execution ritual." Before entering any trade, I identify three things: my reason for entry, my exit plan, and my maximum risk. Once I enter the position, I let the trade work with my stop loss baked in. I don't look at the PnL until after I am stopped out for a loss or till I hit my profit target. My monkey brain is good enough at knowing what the dollars are without me having to look but I literally have to take my hand off the mouse, sit back in my chair and let the trade play out.

There really is nothing extreme about the above, but consider the alternative. How many times have you exited a perfectly good trade simply because you were watching it too closely? How many times has a small temporary drawdown scared you out of what became a big winner? Have you ever flattened out of a trade by accident because you have your mouse hovering over the FLATTEN button? I have. I call it “tourettes finger.” The market is designed to shake out emotional participants, and PnL awareness makes you vulnerable to every shake.

Another powerful technique is what I call "trading in batches." Instead of thinking about individual trades, I think about groups of 20-30 trades. My goal isn't to win on any specific trade but to execute my system faithfully across the entire batch. This mental framework makes individual wins and losses feel less significant, reducing the emotional charge of each outcome.

I also use position sizing that makes each trade feel financially insignificant. If losing $750 on a trade would genuinely upset me, I trade smaller until that amount feels like pocket change. This isn't about being cavalier with money—it's about removing the emotional weight that comes with financial stress and clouds judgment.

The Counter-Intuitive Nature of Professional Trading

Here's what most retail traders never understand: the less you care about individual trade outcomes, the better your overall results become. This seems backward because we're taught that caring more leads to better performance. In most endeavors, this is true. In trading, it's often the opposite.

When you're emotionally detached from individual outcomes, you make decisions based on probability and analysis rather than fear and greed. You hold winning positions longer because you're not tempted by quick profits. You cut losing positions faster because you're not hoping for a miracle comeback. You size positions appropriately because you're thinking about long-term edge rather than short-term excitement.

Professional traders often describe their best trading periods as feeling "boring" or "mechanical." They're not riding emotional roller coasters or celebrating individual wins. They're simply executing their process, trade after trade, with the detached focus of a factory worker on an assembly line.

This doesn't mean becoming emotionless about trading altogether. I still get excited about perfect setups and frustrated by sloppy execution. But these emotions come before the trade (during analysis) or after the trade series (during review), not during the actual execution… although sometimes you catch a ripper and it is hard not to be excited! We are human after all.

Building Your Own PnL Immunity

Developing this skill takes time and deliberate practice. It took me a couple years. Start by identifying your own PnL-driven behaviors. Do you check your positions obsessively? Do you move stops based on current drawdown? Do you take profits earlier when you're having a good day? These are all symptoms of PnL addiction.

Begin with paper trading or very small position sizes while you develop the mental discipline. I am not into journaling trades but I am a huge believer in journaling how I felt during each trade. This is called an emotional intelligence journal. If you try this you'll likely discover patterns—certain types of setups make you more anxious, certain times of day make you more impulsive, certain PnL levels trigger specific behaviors.

Create mechanical rules that remove discretion during trades. If your analysis says the stop should be at 22,000, it stays at 22,000 regardless of what the PnL shows. If your target is 22,100, you don't exit at 22,050 just because you're up nicely. This mechanical approach might feel rigid initially, but it's training wheels for your emotional discipline.

Most importantly, remember that every professional trader has struggled with this. The difference isn't that we don't feel the emotional pull of PnL—it's that we've trained ourselves not to act on it. Like any skill, it improves with practice and degrades without it.

The Long Game

Trading futures is ultimately about playing a probability game over hundreds or thousands of trades. Individual trade outcomes are largely random noise, but your process and execution determine long-term results. When you're focused on PnL, you're optimizing for noise. When you're focused on process, you're optimizing for signal.

The traders who survive and thrive in this business understand that their job isn't to predict what the market will do next—it's to respond appropriately to whatever the market does. This response can only be optimal when it's based on analysis and predetermined rules, not on the emotional reactions triggered by watching profits and losses fluctuate.

Your PnL will take care of itself if your process is sound and your execution is disciplined. But your process will suffer if you're constantly second-guessing it based on short-term financial outcomes. Trust the math, trust your analysis, and trust that good process leads to good results over time.

The market will always be there tomorrow. Your capital, however, is finite. Protect it by trading like a professional, not like someone checking their lottery ticket numbers every few minutes.

Trade the setup, not the money. Execute the plan, not the hope.

Bish