Trader Development
Here we are in the dog days of summer. For many traders, this time of the year is usually difficult. Lower trading activity, volume, and generally lower volatility conspire to keep a lid on many opportunities. This is a time of year when I get a lot of thinking done,
General Comments
Content creation is a strange business. On one hand, we’re swamped with content. I could sit in one place for an entire day and not come close to even touching the surface of all the pieces of content on any one of my social media feeds. And, honestly, most
Psychology
In my previous blog post, I explored how our desires shape trading outcomes—everyone gets what they want from the market. The problem is that wants are not simple—on some level, some people want to lose. Some people want escape; they want to feel that they are superior when
Trader Development
Financial markets are vast, and the ways we can interact with them are almost limitless. However, a few things are clear: there are far more losers than winners in the market. The ways to lose, especially as active traders, are much easier to find than the ways to win. One
Trader Development
“Okay, so think about it like this, what if you were a competitive farmer?” It was an early Saturday and I was working with a trader (let’s call him Sam) in a private coaching session. I do my best work as a coach when I’m following my sometimes
Individual Traders
In trading, perhaps more than most other fields, there’s a big gap between knowledge and results. Success can be elusive, and the path to that success, for both discretionary and systematic traders, is not clearly marked. Essential knowledge Many people are drawn to markets as a way to make
Trader Development
“Learn from the market. Let the market be your teacher.” This sounds like the path to true trading wisdom (and it is), but there’s an obvious question: how do we learn from the market? Everything in trading reduces down to patterns and statistics. If you find that statement challenging,
General Comments
“While you are walking on the road, if you happen to meet the Buddha, you must kill him.” So reads one of the more enigmatic teachings in Zen Buddhism (attributed to Linji Yixuan (fl. ca. 850 CE) from a turbulent and most interesting period in Chinese history, if you want
Psychology
I’ve been doing some exciting and challenging work recently, and want to share some of it with you. A quick biographical sketch, for those of you who don’t know me: I’ve been trading full time more or less continuously since the late 1990s. I found my first
Psychology
A few thoughts on shorting stock markets, which may prove to be especially relevant here, as we head into the end of 2022. Long-term stock bias One of the most important things any stock trader must keep in mind is that stock markets have a strong upward bias over any
General Comments
Yesterday, a trader I have worked with a bit over the years (let’s call him M) pinged me with this real-money equity curve: (For the record, that's a pretty good equity curve, aside from the last trades. (I'd also ask some questions about the nearly
Psychology
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about uncertainty lately—and about making decisions with incomplete information. Over the past two years, we've all had to make decisions in an uncertain environment as the world struggles with Covid. There are many other lessons and parallels from other