Investing is easy to fall into a trap: the more you lose, the more you add.

When the system hits consecutive stop-losses, it feels uncomfortable. Facing volatility, anxiety skyrockets. What is your first reaction at this moment? It’s often to add more—reading a few more books, filling the K-line chart with colorful indicators, trying to "tame" the market’s randomness layer by layer with filters. You tell yourself, this loss must be because I overlooked something, the parameters weren’t set correctly, just need to optimize a bit more.

But a harsh fact is staring you in the face: this obsession with complexity is actually an escape from the most fundamental uncertainty of the market.

**Complexity becomes an escape for disciplined cowards**

Charlie Munger once used a very poignant metaphor—when someone fails, they first check if their knife is sharp enough, if their stance is elegant enough, instead of reflecting on the entire system itself. It’s the same in trading.

When your system only has one indicator, you must honestly follow the rules. But what if you add five indicators? That’s when tricks come into play—Indicator A says sell, you look at Indicator B: hey, it hasn’t crossed yet, let’s hold on. Nobel Prize-level rationalizations are born from this. These indicators have never truly become your weapons; instead, they become tools you use to self-soothe when you break your rules.

The beauty of complexity is that it makes "deviation" seem so natural. Every time you should have cut losses but didn’t, or should have exited but kept averaging down, you can find a seemingly "reasonable" explanation from some indicator somewhere. These moments of self-deception are precisely the triggers for your account to start shrinking.

**The essence of investing is simply about who makes fewer mistakes.** The final outcome of a long race is often not determined by your intelligence, but by how well you can stick to discipline.