How This Started
Back in late 2018, our founder was working with a small group of retail traders who kept making the same mistakes. They had solid strategies. They understood risk management on paper. But they'd still blow up their accounts.
The problem wasn't knowledge. It was execution under pressure. Fear kicked in at the worst times. Greed made them hold winners too long or cut them too early.
So we shifted focus entirely. Instead of teaching more technical analysis, we started working on the mental frameworks that separate consistent traders from the ones who wash out after six months.
By mid-2019, we had developed our first structured program. It combined behavioral finance research with practical trading scenarios that actually reflected what happens when real money is on the line.
What We Actually Believe
These aren't marketing slogans. They're the principles that guide how we design every program and work with every trader.
Pattern Recognition Takes Time
Your brain needs to see the same setup fail and succeed dozens of times before it stops triggering fear responses. We build programs around repetition and realistic timeframes.
Emotions Aren't the Enemy
Trying to eliminate emotion from trading is a waste of energy. We teach you to recognize emotional states early and adjust your position sizing accordingly.
Process Over Outcomes
A losing trade executed with discipline is a success. A winning trade that violated your rules is a failure. We measure what matters for long-term survival.
Journaling Is Non-Negotiable
You can't improve what you don't track. We provide structured frameworks for reviewing trades based on decision quality, not just profit and loss.
Risk Management Is Psychology
Position sizing isn't math. It's managing your emotional capacity. We help you find the sweet spot where losses don't trigger panic and wins don't trigger overconfidence.
Market Conditions Change You
What works in your psychology during a trending market often fails in choppy conditions. We teach adaptive mental frameworks, not rigid rules.
Who Runs This
We're not influencers with rented Lamborghinis. We're traders and behavioral researchers who've spent years figuring out why smart people make dumb decisions when money is at stake.
Torben Wiklund
Lead Trading Psychology Instructor
Torben spent eight years trading equity derivatives before burning out completely in 2017. That experience taught him more about trading psychology than any book ever could. He rebuilt his approach from scratch, focusing on sustainable mental models, and now teaches others how to avoid the same pitfalls. He holds a background in behavioral economics and has been developing our core curriculum since 2019.
Saskia Järvinen
Risk Psychology Specialist
Saskia came to trading through risk management consulting for institutional clients. She noticed that retail traders face the same cognitive biases as portfolio managers, just with less infrastructure to catch their mistakes. Her work focuses on building practical risk frameworks that account for human decision-making under uncertainty. She joined WaveHub in 2021 after working with several prop trading firms in Singapore.
How We Actually Work With Traders
Our method isn't complicated. It's just structured around how people actually develop new mental habits, not how trading books say they should.
Baseline Assessment
We start by having you trade your current system for two weeks while keeping a detailed psychological journal. This reveals your actual patterns, not what you think you do. Most traders are surprised by the gap between their self-perception and their logged behavior.
Pattern Identification
We analyze your journal entries to identify specific triggers that lead to rule violations. Maybe it's consecutive losses. Maybe it's boredom during consolidation. Everyone has different weak points, so cookie-cutter advice doesn't help much.
Framework Implementation
Based on your patterns, we introduce specific mental frameworks and decision protocols. These aren't trading systems but cognitive tools that interrupt destructive thought patterns before they become actions. Think pre-trade checklists, position sizing calculators, and timeout protocols.
Ongoing Refinement
Psychology work is never finished. Market conditions change, life circumstances shift, and what worked last quarter might not work now. We maintain contact with students through regular review sessions where we adjust frameworks based on current challenges.
A Real Example From 2024
The Overtrading Problem
One of our students was consistently profitable on paper but barely breaking even in actual trading. The issue wasn't strategy. He was taking too many trades outside his defined setup criteria, especially after small losses.
We implemented a simple intervention: after any losing trade, he had to wait 30 minutes and document three reasons why his next potential trade met his criteria. If he couldn't write those three reasons clearly, no trade.
This friction dramatically reduced his revenge trading. Over the next three months, his trade count dropped by 40%, but his win rate increased and he ended up with his first consistently profitable quarter.
The solution wasn't complicated. It was just creating space between impulse and action.
Talk About Your Trading Psychology