Learning To Breathe Pt.1

Hmmm, 2 months since the last post . . . are those crickets I hear chirping?

It would be nice to say that I've spent the past eight weeks blissfully enjoying the fruits of my trading, sipping iced tea on some sandy shore without a care for what the markets were doing. That would be nice indeed.

Instead, I must admit to a short but harrowing round-trip to hell and back again. I'll save you from the gorier details, but let's just say 'irrational' doesn't come close to describing the drama that was enacted. For a few ugly weeks, it seemed I could not give away my equity to the markets fast enough. The same old story, the same repeated mistakes. But this time, it bordered on deliberate. What's the classic Market Wizard quote? Everybody gets what they want out of the markets. So -- did I want "out of the markets", or what? Was there a hidden urge to push everything over the edge, and be done with this whole trading thing? For a while it certainly felt that way. Because the entire time as I sank deeper into my own self-made grave, suffering through one mini-blow up after the next, a single thought drummed through my brain endlessly, over and over: What a fucking waste of time.

A waste of time. It was a thought that frequently triggered simultaneously with my stops on the inevitable deterioration of any profitable position nursed too long. Even if no damage was done to closed equity, even if the risk in holding out for greater gains was coldly calculated beforehand, I'd still have an irresistible urge to take inventory of the time spent in constant indecision, the hours of emotions pulled high and low as the position surged and retraced. All that effort and energy expended -- for nothing. But now the thought encompassed more than just the previous trade; it was how I was starting to subconsciously regard the past seven years entirely. I'd driven my account to the very edge, another step from which there would be no going back. And pehaps that was exactly where I needed to be, if only to be able to answer the question right at the crossroads: Is the life of a trader really what I still wanted?

Well -- I'm still here trading. Still here writing. You may extrapolate what you will what mental resolutions were necessary in choosing to continue on; the details are not important. The essential point was: whether or not all of it was truly a waste of time was simply my choice to make.

To be continued . . .

PS -- I originally intended to call this post "The Abyss" and quote Lou Manheim from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. But honestly, I found I did not care much for reliving the lowest moment for the sake of putting it into words (I actually started writing this a week ago), which is why this first part kinda ends abruptly. Perhaps because weeks have elapsed since then, everything I remember about it comes back hazy and distant, almost dream-like. In fact, I still feel sort of sheepish about the whole episode in retrospect, if only because at times I feel like I'm repeating the same story over and over. But I guess that makes sense after all: it's actually just one story that stretches back over my entire experience as a trader, and by no means should you get the idea that some turning point can be reached in a matter of weeks. Each chapter in a trader's life overlaps with another, the lessons being years in the learning, the book years in the making. And with any luck, it will be years more before my story ends. But anyways, if you're wondering, the title of this post will make more sense after the next part, so hang in there a bit.