This post will be different than most of my posts, going into my more personal thoughts on trading. No technicals, no statistics, no screenshots. Just my thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about why, even after I claimed I was quitting for good in April of 2024, I still enjoyed watching the markets the entire rest of 2024 and 2025 - the August Yen trade unraveling in summer 2024, the tariff turmoil in April 2025 - I was always still checking charts 3-4 times per week. I realized that trading was still hanging in the back of my head - in short, I’ve never given up at getting good at something that I’ve originally set my mind to. I’m overly stubborn and overly competitive to let “sunk costs” amount to nothing. It’ just not who I am.
It’s one of the most competitive, challenging games in the world. It’s you vs. hundreds of thousands of other humans, algorithms, and institutions. (In the short term, i.e. session by session (day) basis, I think of markets this way - but over the long term, I like to think of markets, at least the equities markets, as a long-term “hop-on hop-off” ride that raises all boats over long time frames).
Trading is mathematically incredibly challenging. You’ve got price, time, and volume. That’s it. Nearly every single other indicator is derived from those 3 metrics. Seems simple, but in the statistics world, it’s one of the most intellectually engaging, challenging, and complex arenas on the planet.
I’m trying my absolute hardest with the massive dataset that is AMTJOY, to eek out any sort of statistical edges I can - but again, these “edges” are only slim at best, and the live price action and volume of the unfolding session are far more important than any historical analysis. That said, historical analysis can also help you keep your delusions of grandeur at bay - maximum expected moves, ranges, and risk management are just some of the benefits of such analysis.
Trading is psychologically incredibly challenging. I’m very competitive by nature, but most things of a competitive nature throughout my life were about raw output or doing ‘more’ of something. Mountain hiking lists, running races, getting the best grades, number of lines of code written, number of SaaS products released. Trading is the exact opposite. Doing nothing except waiting patiently is, in fact, going to put you on the profitable trader list much faster than doing anything else.
My best trades in my career so far were the ones I wasn’t even looking at. Set your risk vs. reward, and trust markets to move. That’s what they're there for. If you're wrong, that’s great too - it’s new information you can learn from, add, and sharpen your edge, or, like many times the case, it could have been that A+ setup that just didn’t work this time - after all, even the best setups I’ve ever found are only 60-70% likely - and many of these setups are so stupidly prefiltered they are probably an artifact of chance anyway.
All these essentially backwards-against-evolution behaviours take a very, very, VERY long time to control. Notice I say “control”. You will never be able to “get over” or “eliminate” them completely - and that’s one of the reasons that trading is under the surface so much more incredibly challenging than a simple “buy or sell” on the surface. (By the way, I am nowhere NEAR having this control mastered. In fact, I think it’s probably something nobody ever masters, and is rather more of a constant thing you have to remind yourself of and strive towards than ever truly learning it. Even the greatest traders struggle with the same issues after trading for DECADES.)
Welcome to the greatest game.
A good place you can pour your efforts into is your system and reflecting - running statistics checks, backtesting, reviewing, journaling, and writing. These are great outlets that can make you a better trader. That’s mainly why I write this blog - both from the psychological and statistical side. It will be free, forever - I get value from posts like these that help me refine my psychological understanding of trading, while statistical posts help me refine my trading system.
Trading is clean. At the end of each day, week, month, and year, you have your P&L. It shows if you have an edge or not (and, most crippling to many - you will have time periods where you may really have edge and are anyway experiencing a drawdown - again, welcome to the greatest game).
In a hype-driven, overly-saturated social media world, I find trading a humble escape from all the noise. I don’t read media on the market - they anyway make up headlines on this or that or what caused the latest move, but when you’re IN the market, IN a trade or waiting for one, price is price and no media story will properly describe every tick of movement.
There are no politics in trading. As much as many of the X guru / furu / whatever folks will try to involve their own politics into their trades, they are mostly delusional and their political views don’t matter. Like 99% of everything else in trading, if you did a correlation study of majority political party in power to something like S&P returns, you’d find absolutely no correlation. For (I don’t know, the third time at least in this post?) Price is price! It doesn’t care much at all about political tempearture of the day. Again, you have only price, time, and volume, and your task is only to be on the right side of where the market is moving, with a defined risk and strategy.
Despite social media and the enormous amount of content that is generated about trading, from my count, there quite literally only 5-6 people I can truly count as consistently profitable traders. I’m trying every day to become a member of this exclusive group - but only time will tell. (Good news - it’s going well! See the latest results of the Coffee Challenge for August!)
As always, I hope this post helped you in any way, and I’m looking forward to the future.
-Chris
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