Dull Is the Destination

It's not your purpose to make a profit from the single trade in front of you - whether you're in it or about to be.

Say what?

Your purpose is to get through a bunch of trades (call it 20), stop, measure, review and reflect. Any one single thing to change? Now rinse and repeat.

But easier said than done. You see your account go up, and then a loss or two takes it back down. F me. You say.

And it's that f me that's telling you: More rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

Until you've done it so many times it dulls your sensations - the hot streaks, the give-it-backs, the cold streaks.

So until it's dull, the only goal is dullness.

Every business, at its core, does one thing. Reproduces.

A restaurant reproduces meals. A law firm reproduces services. Amazon reproduces sales. And amongst the profits are breakeven and losing deals.

Different outputs, different economics - but underneath all of it there's a familiar repeating process, over and over.

Trading is the same. It's not the unit, it's the reliable chunk of trades that, overall, turns a profit. So you run it again.

Yet over 90% of traders spend their entire time in the market responding emotionally to every swing because they don't have that to lean on.

But let's say you are in that tiny minority who at least finally have a repeatable framework that works, one you’ve run through your own hands.

It's usually after years of failing, before finally stepping inside a firm or working closely with someone who can transfer the framework directly, only to completely suck at trading the first few months - because it doesn't come instantly.  

So to come this far and finally see the finish line, it feels like an arrival. It feels like you're 95% of the way there. That's only natural.

But it's more like 65.

I'll own something here. I haven't always said this clearly enough.

Not because the last stretch is the hardest. It's the opposite - it's the shortest, the ground is flatter. But you're a bit spent. 

It's not the toughest stretch psychologically - not compared to the years before it. Not even close.

Yet it feels hard when you've got years of failure as a backdrop and you've burned everything you had getting to where you are. Digging in again, after that, asks a lot.

You've been running a marathon where you thought the finish line was back there, at the point when it all started to click. Now someone is pointing further up the road. 

Even with a solid framework and playbook running, you're still not at complete dullness.

Hot streak comes - you feel it. Cold streak hits - you feel it. You give some back - you feel it. 

The numbers stare back at you 'This is it, a repeatable profitable business.' But you still feel every individual winner and loser.

It's fatiguing and takes away some of the shine of "Holy sh*t, I'm finally trading like a business"

Dullness is when those sensations flatten. Not because you stop caring, but because not caring about the trade in front of you is in your DNA now. 

Now, finally, it’s about solving the puzzle, comprehending the plays and executing the craft. That's when trading becomes what you always imagined it could be.