Built from Blown Accounts and Hard Lessons
The Trapped Trader started where most trading stories end: revenge trades, blown accounts, and the same cycle on repeat for years.
The Short Version
I’m Jon. I’ve blown hundreds of prop firm accounts. Wiped out multiple options cash accounts. Spent over $100,000 learning how to trade, and most of that money bought me nothing but the same lesson I refused to learn. I chased revenge trades at 9 PM, doubled down on losers because my ego wouldn’t take the stop, and convinced myself that one more contract would fix everything. It never did. Every time, I’d blow up, feel the shame, swear I was done, fund another account a week later, and repeat the whole cycle. For years.
The turning point wasn’t a new indicator or a better setup. It was admitting that my strategy wasn’t the problem. I was the problem. I knew what to do. I just couldn’t do it when money was on the line and my emotions were running the show.
So I stopped chasing setups and started building process. I stopped measuring my trading by green and red days and started measuring it by whether I followed my own rules. A losing trade taken with discipline? That’s a win. A profitable trade taken off-plan? That’s a problem to fix. Once that clicked, I stopped blowing accounts.
What This Place Is
Most trading education hands you a strategy and tells you to execute. When you can’t, they tell you to be more disciplined. That’s not a solution. That’s a bumper sticker. The Trapped Trader exists because the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it is where most traders lose their money. Closing that gap is what everything here is built around.
That means concrete frameworks, not theory. Before you enter a trade, you run a three-step check: size, stop, bias. When you’re in a drawdown, you follow a protocol that tells you exactly when to cut size and when to walk away for the day. Every blog post, every lesson, every tool on this site gives you a structure to be disciplined inside. Because discipline without structure is just willpower. And willpower runs out.
What This Place Is Not
I’m not going to show you screenshots of my P&L and tell you to buy my course. I’m not selling signals, running a Discord full of call-outs, or promising you’ll be profitable in 30 days. That’s the stuff that kept me trapped in the first place.
Start with the blog. If the way I think about trading makes sense to you, Level 1 of the course is free and covers the full foundation.