In my understanding, a gambler is a person who cannot restrain themselves from random trades. This is a trader who has undergone training (or self-taught), created their profitable trading system, but continues to deplete deposit after deposit because they cannot adhere to their own rules. For every good systematic trade made by such a person, there are several random trades that eat away all the profit from
a good deal and it also leads to losses. The first two years of trading, I was exactly
that kind of person.
It's important not to confuse a gambler with a novice who has been in the market for less than a year, does not yet have their own trading system, has not studied anywhere, and makes random trades based on intuition, feelings, others' signals, etc. In this case, one cannot judge the presence of any pathologies, as it does not relate to trading at all yet.
In my attempts to 'kill' the gambler in me, I studied a huge amount of information on trading psychology and psychology in general. And gradually I came to understand that it is impossible to change one's essence. Willpower, emotional-volitional control, and other psychic properties that should restrain a person from gambling are innate. They cannot be artificially cultivated.
The good news is that you can become a profitable trader even without possessing the necessary psychological qualities. For this, it will be necessary to structure the trading process in such a way that triggers requiring willpower to suppress them do not get activated.
You can't kill the gambler in you! But you can choose not to wake him up!
It's important to clarify that these very triggers that awaken gambling can be different for everyone. Finding your own cockroaches that pull the strings in your head can only be helped by regularly keeping a trader's psychological diary. And its daily analysis. There is a lot of information on how to keep such a diary online now.
But there are general recommendations that will help everyone without exception. They helped me a lot.
1. The very first thing you need to do is to give up leverage. At least until you reach stable positive statistics for at least three months. When I started trading, I thought that if I had a small deposit, there was no point in opening trades without leverage because you could never grow that way. In reality, it turned out the opposite: when I eliminated leverage, my deposit began to grow very quickly. Because when you trade without leverage, each profitable or losing trade does not trigger strong emotions since the profit or loss is very small (in percentage of the deposit).
When you trade without leverage, you don't feel the stupid urge to recover all losses with one trade or start getting euphoric about a large profit and go all-in, believing in your abilities.
2. Take breaks. The resource of discipline and emotional-volitional control is very small. If you stay in active trading mode for a long time without breaks, the resource to restrain yourself from random trades won't last long, and you will start gambling. Therefore, whenever possible, you should step away from the computer. Ideally, switch to physical activity.
3. Start trading in a team. Find a few people who are as new as you are and agree that at the end of each day, you will explain (analyze) your trades to each other. Every time you feel the urge to make a random trade, you will remember that in the evening you will have to show that trade to others. No one wants to look like a gambler in the eyes of their colleagues.
Wishing you all profits!