Everyone who’s traded with some regularity knows that there are moments where all that momentum—all those surging stocks, all those brilliant finds—seems to pause. It happens to everyone not named Warren Buffett at some point. It’s certainly happened to me, more often than I’d like to admit. These plateaus can be so stressful, and with good reason. Good investing is based on growth. When that stops, it’s natural to panic. And it makes sense psychologically, too. Have you ever noticed what happens when you get a pay raise? You start to spend more. Maybe you get a nicer apartment, or you buy a better car, or go on vacation. It’s natural. But that means you’ve developed an expectation. And when life takes that money away, you’re left reeling. The same happens with trading. We build expectations based on how we’ve performed. If I have a quarter that sees a jump in growth, it’s hard to rationally think, “the next quarter might average out and my growth might slow.” With this expectation comes inevitable disappointment. We all have bad days or weeks or even months, but what I’m talking about are those plateaus that seem to suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong with your approach. Those plateaus that linger—those are the ones that will lose you money and make you want to quit altogether. Not to mention how bad things could get when my portfolio was plateauing and then life happened—black sheep events like, I don’t know, a worldwide pandemic, for example. Then I really wanted to quit. At least, that’s how I felt after my worst plateaus. The more frustrated and exasperated I got, the worse my portfolio started to do. I started making wildly risky moves. And then I started losing serious money. What I should have done, if I’d only known, was find a tool that would help find the problems in my portfolio and tell me how to fix them. Sound too good to be true? That’s what I thought, too. That was until a friend of mine on social media recommended I try an analysis program that could churn the numbers in my portfolio and see where I was coming up short. I’ve always been a person who trusted his gut above all, for better or for worse. But when I finally relented, I realized the err of my ways. And, above all, I realized that my years of having plateaus could have been largely avoided. Funny how getting an outside perspective can help you see things differently. But the key was finding an analysis program that could not only figure out what my portfolio was missing, but how to be preventative. How to help me avoid future plateaus. Fortunately, this friend pointed me in the right direction. He told me about a list of analysis programs, but the recently released Chaikin Analytics sounded like the best fit right away. It combined incredible data mining with an expert’s take. That balance—of human expertise and algorithmic efficiency—put it way ahead of the other analysis programs. Now, I look forward to growth and leaving the plateaus behind.