Happy new year fellow traders!

2024 reflection and looking forward...

Good evening valued subscriber,

2024 was a good year for me. I had my breakthrough along time ago in sports trading. Since then, I always had lofty ambitions as to where I’d be. It turns out that turning profitable, whilst exciting was not the hardest part of my journey.

When I say I started from scratch, I mean literally. Inside and out of trading. Perhaps it was an advantage entering markets like horse racing and cricket without any knowledge. I was able to trade both successfully, relatively quickly & without any preconceived bias. But I developed some terrible habits that were largely a by product of things I was doing outside of trading: living chaotically, sleeping sporadically, trading without direction, staking inconsistently and switching strategies regularly.

I ingrained those habits to the point where my success stalled rather quickly and for the 1st 3 years, my profits remained the same, even stagnating some what. I became complacent when I turned profitable. The learning curve pretty much stopped. Couple that with my chaotic uni life routine and it’s a recipe for mediocrity. 3 years work, with little to show for it. The only advantage I had was time on my side: living at home, no bills and responsibilities.

Fed up, I revamped myself: Everything from strategy, to risk management, to market selection became regimented. Whilst my profits soared, I was still susceptible to the odd blow up and my slumps lasted longer than they should’ve.

Presently, I feel very comfortable with my skill as a trader. Sifting through data and number crunching just isn’t worth the extra juice at my stage in my opinion. I prefer a balanced middle ground, coupling the quantitative side with the qualitative side. Having traded many years I’ve learned to trust my intuition. The numbers simply serve as a back up.

Instead, I pour most of my energy into analysing performance. It started a couple of years when I began journaling: Writing down my emotions and state of mind during sessions and recording the quality of my decisions. Trading at it’s core is about decision making: make more good than bad decisions and the money will follow. We only have so many good decisions we’re capable of making in a day. We can only function optimally for a limited time so consequently, we must keep our entries and exits deliberate and minimal. Preparation however should be maximal. And I don’t mean just through note taking and data crunching.

I mean by staying sharp mentally and physically. Taking care of your health, building and maintaining high quality relationships, organising our time and structuring a schedule well in advance and doing it in a way that positions you to take advantage of only the highest quality trades and attacking them with an empty, focused state of mind.

My knowledge of the markets has improved marginally over the last couple of years but my understanding of my mind has improved drastically. The inevitable dry patches are shorter & less damaging. The momentum I build lasts longer and the come down period is managed carefully. The markets I enter are far less frequent. The justification behind my entries and exits are far stronger. With the start up of my new Discord community, there’s an added element of accountability through transparency and scrutiny of my positions.

Another aspect to trading that’s overlooked is the financial habits you practise away from it. This was something that harmed me for a long time. I was spinning my wheels for nothing for many years since I was not building my bank roll. When my lifestyle expenses crept up with age, the pressure to earn was detrimental to my work. Through thorough book keeping and mindfulness about my spending, I was able to balance the books and steadily grow my bank roll to a point where the pressure of maintaining a high ROI dissipated.

The point I’m making is that trading for me, was a channel for exposing the worst parts about who I was: lazy & chaotic. Losing money makes you realise that quickly! And through journaling and making a conscious effort to rid myself of those habits, I’ve been able to strip away the bad habits, slowly. Trading has therefore been a process about unlearning as well as learning.

Much of this introspection was thrust upon at the peak of the 2021 crypto bull run. Up until then I felt I was having my ‘breakout’ year as I was breaking every personal record 1 after another, in sports and crypto trading. I was flying high and my greed caused me to fall back to Earth quickly as I lost multiple 5 figures.

It was my worst failure as a trader and took me a year to recover from. I suddenly lost faith in my edge and my ability to even continue as a trader. But as stressful and anxiety inducing that episode was, it forced me to do some serious soul searching. And through introspection, the flaws and bad habits I unearthed in myself have certainly saved me from potentially bigger calamities in the future.

The point I’m making is, if you’re not where you want to be, or had a ‘taste’ of breakout success before losing it all like I did, then worry not. Because losing is the best thing to happen to you. It’s a chance for you to uncover where you went wrong. A lesson learned saves you from doing it again. Rarely does anyone mess up once, sometimes we have to screw up several times. Screw ups are the most important part of a journey. You don’t have to encounter ‘disaster’ but there’s no such thing as a risk free endeavour. Every road has it’s own set of obstacles. So embrace risk, prepare for failure and learn what not to do.

Success then becomes just a process of elimination. In the last 3 years, I haven’t had a ‘breakout’ year. Rather it’s been a steady, upward trending curve of consistent improvement. Last year’s trading profits was only around 10% higher than the year before. But I traded considerably less. I used to be buried in the screens. The effort I put into ‘not working’ paid dividends.

The new Discord community was created to help others but through the relationships I’m building, it’s been immensely valuable for me too. Winning alone is hard. Winning with a team who are on the same mission is far easier. Most people are going to lose in this game and lose badly. If you’re going to hunt alone then be prepared. Otherwise join a team, whoever that may be, that’s likely going to win big in the long run. The bounty will only fall in the hands of a few in this game.

I feel like I’m on the verge of another breakout opportunity, like in 2021. Only this time, I’ll be ready to receive it and I’ll be ready to handle it. I now know how to ensure my profits are built to last. Maybe 2025 is ‘that’ year, maybe it’s not. 1 thing it won’t be is a screw up.

Happy new year. I hope you make the right choices not just today, but consistently and daily.

Best of luck.

AT