DID EVOLUTION PROGRAM US TO FEEL FOMO? I had never thought about FOMO this way until a recent review session w an 8-figure pnl per year trader. Credit to him on this one! For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, opportunities to secure food were scarce, unpredictable, and potentially essential to survival. Over thousands of years, it’s plausible that we developed powerful instincts to recognize opportunities and feel urgency when they might disappear. Now think about how counterproductive those instincts can be in trading. We feel those same emotions while “hunting” a trading opp. Your brain is treating a missed opportunity almost as if it were a genuine loss. The problem is that financial markets operate under a very different set of conditions than those our ancestors evolved to navigate. In trading, opportunities are effectively infinite over time. There will be thousands of setups over your career and realistically, you probably aren’t starving or relying on a trade for your next meal. Missing any individual trade has minimal consequence on your long-term success. But acting impulsively on a bad opportunity can have enormous consequences. You can lose capital, damage your confidence, and compromise the discipline that makes you profitable. Ironically, as is often the case in trading, the very instinct that may have helped our ancestors survive can actively threaten our survival as traders. And I think this explains why patience is so extraordinarily difficult in trading. We are fighting against deeply ingrained psychological impulses. Sitting on our hands while watching others make money can feel almost physically uncomfortable, even when we know intellectually that patience is the correct decision. IMO, the first step in fighting FOMO is cognitive recognition: acknowledge that this feeling is a silly outdated survival response and remind yourself that you have enough capital, time, and future opportunities to wait. One of the most important skills in trading is learning to recognize that discomfort without feeling obligated to act on it. You don’t need to catch every move. You don’t even need to catch most moves. You need to preserve your capital and emotional energy for the relatively small number of opportunities where you have a genuine edge.