Many people divide trading into wins and losses, but in fact, this division is fundamentally wrong. Your stop-loss? That’s the cost you must pay to do this business.

Traditional business is straightforward. Cost 1 dollar, sell for 3 dollars, and your ROI is right there. To make money, you have to push volume, sell more goods. But trading is different.

The cost-to-reward ratio here is not fixed—it’s a probabilistic event. Using a 1-dollar stop-loss could potentially yield 10, 100, or even 1000 dollars in profit. Is there a probability? Yes, there is.

The key point is this: traditional business relies on scale to turn around, trading relies on time. The longer you persist, the more likely those small-probability events will occur. But what’s the prerequisite? You have to survive.

So, the primary goal of trading is not how much you earn, but to stay alive. Using 1 dollar of cost to pursue large gains is itself a demonstration of mathematical probability at work. Given enough time, probability will evolve into inevitability.

In simple terms, trading has no wins or losses, only probabilities. Your stop-loss is there to ensure you always remain in this probabilistic game.