Everyone's Posting Their Nvidia Gains
Open any trading feed this year and it looks like everyone is winning. Screenshots of Nvidia positions up triple digits. Account balances with a green line running off the top of the frame. One name held since 2023, now worth more than a house deposit. All of it is real. It is also a filtered sample, and the filter is doing more work than the trades.
Nobody posts the loss. That is the whole mechanism. The trader who bought the same chip names and sold at the wrong time says nothing. Neither does the account that is down for the year on the back of one bad bet, or the person who put too much into a story stock and watched it round-trip. The feed only shows the trades that worked, so it starts to look like the trades usually work.
The gallery of survivors
This has a name. Survivorship bias. The winners self-select into your feed and the losers go quiet, so the sample you see is not the population. Picture a hundred people who each put their money into one high-flying stock. A few of them 10x on luck and timing. Those few post. The ninety who broke even or lost say nothing. Your feed fills with the handful who won, and it feels like the whole room is winning. The room is not.
It happens inside one account too. A trader with ten open positions posts the one that is up 200% and leaves the nine flat or red off-screen. Same person, same account, edited down to the single frame that looks good.
The number they post is not the number they keep
Look closer at the Nvidia screenshot. It is almost always an open position at or near its high, an unrealised number that has not been sold and booked. Late in June the chip names sold off double digits in a single session on nothing worse than profit-taking. A lot of the gains people screenshotted in the middle of the month were smaller by the end of it. The peak went in the post. The give-back did not.
Even the winners are showing you a top tick, not a track record.
What FOMO actually is
The fear of missing out is a comparison, and it is rigged. You are holding your own honest history: every trade, the winners and the losers, the ones you sized wrong, the boring ones that went nowhere. You are comparing all of that against other people's best frames. Of course you feel behind.
The feeling is real. The gap it points to is mostly manufactured by what got left out.
The honest comparison
There is only one track record that tells you the truth, and it is your own. Not a screenshot of one position at its best moment. Your realised results across every trade you took. Win rate, average win, average loss, the size of your worst drawdown, whether the whole thing is up or down for the year. That number does not care what anyone posted.
A trading journal does the one thing the feed cannot: it keeps the losers. Swingfolio logs every trade you take, winners and losers, and shows you the real spread instead of the one good frame. Your average trade. Your actual hit rate. The losses sitting next to the wins. It is not a flattering picture on purpose. It is the true one, and the true one is the only picture you can improve.
The traders posting their Nvidia gains are not lying about the gain. They are just not posting the rest of the account. Judge yourself against your own full record, not against a feed that deleted every loss before you saw it.
General information only. Not financial advice. Trading involves significant risk of loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always do your own research and consider seeking advice from a licensed financial advisor.