Care less. Win more

Aldous Huxley the author of the Brave New World once wrote:

The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.
Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold.

He called it the Law of Reversed Effort and I don’t think there is any activity in the world where this is more true than in trading where the harder we try the more likely we are to fail.

The more we focus on the setup, the tighter we try to control the risk the more likely we are to get stopped out trade, after trade, after trade. I remember in my early days of trading when I still believed all the lies about “discipline” I managed to get stopped out 14 times in a row perfectly encapsulating Einstein’s observation that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Huxley was right of course. Any creative activity (and trading is certainly one) requires relaxation and lack of focus rather than hyperintense attention to subject. Inevitably, my best setup ideas come to me in the shower when I am not thinking about the markets at all.

My bread and butter trade takes place on the one minute chart and requires hyper attention to every detail. If I actually had to do it all myself I would never succeed. Fortunately my algo does 99% of the work so I really don’t have to pay much attention. Thus I found myself with some free time and just for s-ts and giggles decided to see what would happen if I applied my Bounce setup on monthly time frames in FX.

I barely pay attention to FX these days, leaving all the serious trading to K, but just for fun about six weeks ago I decided to post free trade ideas on Twitter. I traded USD/JPY, GBP/USD USD/CAD and was able to bank profits in all of them. My latest idea was in EUR/USD which I posted last week.

I think all of these FX trades are working mainly because I don’t care.  I purposely set  100 pip stops and targets on these trades allowing me to ignore these ideas for days on end. If I get stopped out on the first entry, my algo - the same algo that hypertrades on the 1 minute chart - will sit patiently for days waiting for the trade to set up again. Once it triggers I will casually glance at the action but because my focus is on equities and I truly don’t care about FX I just let it do its thing and the trade finds its way to profit.

I’ve been highly amused by this recent string of “ success” in my FX trading and will continue to post these ideas when the set up presents itself.

I don’t want to mislead you. These aren’t just random ideas that I pull out of my a--. The FX trades are based on a very sound Bounce trading structure that took years of effort to develop.  But the seemingly effortless efficiency of their execution is very much based on me not caring. I am simply not trying hard to succeed and as a result  am succeeding much more than I thought I would. That’s the beauty of Huxley’s Law of Reversed Effort and as traders we would all be well advised to heed its calling.