The Best Thing To Do After A Big Market Move Is Sometimes Nothing!
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After big moves when we see extreme levels of volatility, it’s critical to stay patient and allow the next high-quality setup to come to you. One of the worst mistakes a trader can make is to assume recent momentum will immediately continue, leading to impulsive trades with lower probability or oversized positions driven by FOMO. This is especially dangerous when trading options, where time decay adds another layer of complexity.
It’s important to remember that there will always be another setup. There is no such thing as a once-in-a-lifetime trade. There will be many opportunities ahead—some we’ll catch, some we’ll miss. We’ll hit a few big moves, but more often, we’ll ride smaller ones that sometimes turn into something bigger.
During these times, the best thing we can do is stay patient and preserve our capital. Taking a string of low-probability trades and racking up losses not only damages your account, but it can also shake your confidence—making it harder to pull the trigger when a truly high-probability setup does appear. Those are the trades that matter, and those are the ones that grow our accounts over time.
You won’t catch every move—big or small—and that’s okay. What keeps us in the game long term is having the discipline to wait and the mindset to be at peace with not catching every single market move. Most of the time, the best trade is simply to wait.
