Active trading is an art

Part of the reason I fire up the old blog-o-machine every Sunday is because I am contributing thought to an industry rife with frauds and hacks, hacks who maybe don’t realize they dish out droves of bad information on trading and frauds who would just as shamelessly convince nice old ladies to wire them money.  And I figure, well I better put out something honest and true to persist and resist.  My motivation is reverence for trading competency.  It is quite liberating, right up there with growing something out of the ground that sustains you. Which is why today I posit that active trading is an art.

No indicator guarantees success.  The last month or so, I have demonstrated my systematic approach to forming a bias, and that systematic approach has been dialed in.  It has kept me on the right side of the tape, and with that approach and the rest of my tool kit I have been extracting NASDAQs from the financial complex quite well.  Yet, at the same time, I have internet people giving me grief that my indicators don’t work.  They work just fine.  These people are not making a beautiful performance of their trading.  This is something I cannot teach.

None of us control how the market behaves.  It pops and drops and marks time.  There is no such thing as good or bad, the market simply is.  It is a numeric representation of the net interactions of hundreds-of-thousands of humans and the algorithms they have built to execute their human ideas.  The entire existence of all of this is completely intangible, a collective conscious that we do our best to measure.  How one interacts in this environment is an art.  Are they playful and light?  Or is the market rigged?  Choose your beliefs carefully.  They will tint every observation you see.

We only control our own reasoned choice.  What we choose to take in, what we ignore, and how we interpret that data is something we have power over.  Whether or not we position our capital into or out of a position is a reasoned choice.  The reasons behind our actions are art.  Are your impressions swayed by the words or actions of others.  That is hardly creative.

I blog to demonstrate a repeatable approach to trading and to offer clarity along the way.  My reasoning is simple.  I was new once and had to wade through this mess of online gurus to find real insight from real people who actually trade.  It sucked.  I paid lots-and-lots of money to phonies, money that would have been better spent on pole barns or solar panels.  To learn to trade you must trade.  And to trade well is an art.

That’s all I am in the mood to write today.

Raul Santos, October 13th, 2019

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