The market does not care

Thanksgiving is the one American holiday whose sentiments if not its origins should be universally admired. After all, who can object to giving thanks once a year for what is for most of us the greatest abundance of wealth and resources in the history of the world? We live in an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity and take it all for granted. If you are unsatisfied with the state of the world (and you certainly have plenty of cause) just follow my Russian approach to life and be grateful for breathing and walking which is 99% of the game especially so in the time of COVID.

So the sentiments of Thanksgiving are noble and we should all apply them as much as we can but when it comes to the market - the market doesn’t care. The market doesn’t care if you are grateful or ungrateful. If you’ve flossed your teeth and meditated or stumbled to your monitor bleary eyed and hung over. The market will do what it wants to do and nothing you do to improve yourself will have any impact on whether you win or lose.

I listen to a lot of trading podcasts when I walk the dogs and nothing amuses me more than the almost constant devolution into self help talk that permeates so much of that content.

1. You can’t become a consistent trader if you are not consistent in your daily habits.

2. You can’t trade well if you are not in peak physical shape.

3. You can’t be disciplined in your trades if you are not disciplined with yourself.

Over the past two years I haven’t worked out once. I increased my coffee habit to 8 cups per day. I’ve gone more than a few days in a row unshowered and unshaven and often let a week slip by without making my bed.

And yet I’ve never traded better in my life. I am not proud of any of these things. I certainly intend to do better in the new year and whip my sloppy self into shape. But whether I do or not the market will not care.

This is the greatest fallacy that many retail traders fall into. If only I work on myself and become a better, more disciplined human being I will become a better trader. Nope. That’s true in many other arenas of life - in virtually ALL other arenas of life, but not in trading.

I’ve put on perfect trades half asleep barely able to tap out prices on the chiclet keys of my Iphone8 and managed to make some of the worst mistakes ever off my multi monitor setup with ultra-fast keys programmed in.

Success in trading doesn’t depend on your state of mind, the quality of your equipment and not even that much on the execution spreads you receive. Success in trading depends only on one thing - the accuracy and the resiliency of your approach to the current market conditions.

Little while back I tweeted to my friend @MPX_Trader “You don't need to believe in yourself. Just your strategy.” And that’s probably the smartest thing I said all year. My trading became much better when I designed a system that was both in sync with my flawed personality and a specific market structure. A system that did not rely on perfect execution but rather was resilient enough to absorb the multitude of execution mistakes I was bound to make. Now I spend most of my time trying to make less mistakes rather than rely on a perfect setup to make my pips and because I have less fear - since I have essentially provided ample room for my system to fail multiple times - I am actually trading better, with more confidence and more consistency.

But none of this came from better eating habits, more workouts or god forbid any type of meditation. It just came from me stumbling through the dark creating something that I was comfortable with and then doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Don’t get me wrong. I really admire clean living and fully intend to rouse myself from the COVID stupor of the past two years, but whether I do or not - the market wouldn’t care.