Writing at the Edge of the Map

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 of it is flotsam. It’s incredibly easy to generate trivial content, and AI is making this ever-easier. I wonder how anyone is going to sort the garbage from the good stuff, and, as a writer I worry that my hard work will be missed.

My blog has not been particularly active in recent years. That’s only one of the contributing reasons. I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of coding and working on further refining my understanding of financial markets. This has led to some new tools and perspectives, and I think some of this is soon to be shared with the public.

I also have sensed a real hunger for solid information aimed at developing traders. Of course, I have decades of work out there on the topic, and some of it stands with the best available. It’s become a bit difficult to write about markets because I’ve already written most of the important stuff. I’m loath to repeat myself, but I also realize that some truth buried in a blog written 8 years ago has likely faded into nearly complete obscurity.

I’m going to try an experiment over the next few months of writing “from scratch” in this space. I’m not going to be afraid of covering the same ground, rehashing the same topics, or simply saying the same things again. I’m doing this in response to many traders who have asked me recently some variation of the question “what do I need to do to be successful?” I’m hoping I can lay out a more complete map of the territory.

Speaking of maps, some things can’t be mapped. As my last post (nearly half a year ago) on this blog hinted, I’ve been playing around with some things that don’t map and with the very confusing edges of existing maps. This work has continued to advance, and I’ve decided to launch a substack where I will explore some of these topics.

Be warned: this project will be different. One of my readers (well, more than one, really) said something like, “just so you know, this first post sounds a little unhinged…” Yes, it does. But I need to allow myself the ability to use language in some different ways if we are going to explore topics that, truly, don’t map very well to our everyday experiences.

This new project will cover some things that are extremely important for traders such as probability, understanding certainty and uncertainty, evaluating quality of knowledge, and many more. But we will also cover some topics that may be a bit too “fringe” or far-out for some sensibilities. This will be a fun exploration of a growing edge and I’m happy to have you along for the journey!

So, I invite you to also check out my new (free) substack: First Fire.