Keys to Great Trading

 

3/23/25 – What if a key to great trading is found in what you do during the time when you’re not trading?  What are you doing between trades to generate ideas, to track shifts in what you trade, to track shifts in the markets that impact what you trade?  When I compared being a trader to being a sniper, I pointed out that “It’s a beautiful feeling to plan one good trade, execute it to perfection, and then sit back and wait for the next opportunity.  Any performance skill, honed and executed with precision, is a kind of work of art.  I think the best snipers understand that”.  

The artistry of great trading is found in what we are doing when we’re not staring at screens and firing away.  Like the sniper, we succeed because of our focus during the 99% of the time that we’re not firing.  Creative vision is what makes a work of art.  It is also what makes for artful trading.  Skilled traders have studied and experienced so many markets that they can recognize when a meaningful pattern is playing out.  What if we only traded when that creative insight came to us, when we saw–truly saw–how things were playing out?  The cost of overtrading lies not just in the P/L lost, but in the damage we inflict upon our capacity for creative insight.  Our job is not to make great trades; it’s to have the wisdom and restraint to allow great trades to come to us.