Do Traders 'Overcomplicate Trading Until It Stops Working?' Should It Be About Simplifying Everything, Or 'Is Complexity Actually Needed?'

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Many traders keep adding indicators, filters and new strategies until their trading systems become impossible to follow consistently.

A recent discussion in the Reddit community r/Trading explored whether traders “overcomplicate trading until it stops working” and whether profitable trading is actually much simpler than most people think.

Most Traders Start With Complexity

After the original poster asked whether trading is just about “simplifying everything, or is complexity actually needed?” The responses painted a picture that many newer traders probably don’t expect.

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According to dozens of experienced commenters, profitable trading often looks repetitive, slow and even dull from the outside. Instead of constantly chasing new indicators and strategies, many said consistency comes from simplifying execution and sticking to strict rules.

One trader who said they’d been trading for more than eight years broke the process down into phases. The commenter described starting out with “strategy-hopping and guru chasing,” joining signal groups and watching endless trading videos before eventually reaching what was described as “The Dark Night Of The Soul” after repeated losses.

According to the commenter, things only improved after stripping everything back down. “Remove all indicators from the chart,” he wrote. “Unfollow all trading gurus. Leave every signals group” and “unlearn all the useless strategies.”

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That theme repeated throughout the thread, as many traders said that beginners mistake complexity for sophistication. Instead of trusting a small number of repeatable setups, they keep adding filters, indicators and new rules every time a strategy hits a rough patch.

“Complexity is usually a symptom of not trusting the system,” one commenter wrote.

“Every time a setup does not work you add a filter to avoid that loss in hindsight,” another trader explained how this usually happens in practice. “After six months you have seventeen conditions that all have to align and the strategy fires twice a year.”

Some said profitable trading becomes “boring” because successful systems often require patience instead of constant action. One trader said his best-performing strategy only triggers once every other week, but trying to force additional trades usually hurts performance.

“When trading works, it gets boring because you are basically just sitting on your hands to not spoil a good thing,” the commenter wrote.

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Discipline Matters More Than Excitement

While many agreed simple systems tend to work better, traders also pushed back on the idea that markets themselves are simple.

One  said trading should involve “simplicity in the mechanics, complexity in understanding market movement/geopolitics/economics.” Others added that profitable traders still study market regimes, volatility and macroeconomic conditions, but keep their execution process clean and repeatable.

Risk management also came up repeatedly as the real dividing line between profitable and unprofitable traders.

“The boring part is actually just consistency,” one commenter wrote. “Not letting losses make you fearful or angry. Not letting wins make you overconfident.”

As more retail traders focus on discipline and consistency over hype-driven strategies, some are using simulated futures accounts and funded trader programs to refine their systems before trading larger positions with personal capital.

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