Understanding your own writing
I felt completely in the zone writing today. I've started to understand what drives my writing and it's helping me create a mental blue print that I can follow so that I don't have to think of every little detail along the way. There's a character sketch process. Characters drive good story telling to me. I don't want to just write about how this trade happened without an understanding of the character who got into it (and often that character is me, that's when writing is easiest because I know my own voice). There's a timeline process. There are breakdowns of trades or certain market periods. And then there's pictures and some morsels of humor. I try to blend all that so it's not just typical ABC trading blog or twitter bs--"I traded AAPL today, got stopped out and lost 129 million. OH WELL gg market."
I think you guys will like it. It's not meant to be incendiary but to provoke some age old debate about whether discretionary or systems trading is 'better'. I'm very interested to see what kind of feedback I get. Will you side with me, a discretionary bum who does it himself, or side with Mr. Systems Trader who backtests everything?
I'm also proud to say I did not make a single trade today. I said I'm done for 2024 and I mean it. I had an ideal picture of myself many months ago where I could trade and write at the same time. Slower market, I'd write a paragraph. Market heats up, I make a trade. Now I look back at my attempt to do this in the last 6 months and I see it's just too much of a challenge. Once I flip trader switch 'On', all my thoughts are all about trading and all my compulsions are to open my platform and check the price of the most recent stock I traded. I hit a small amount of resistance in my writing process and BAM, flood gates open up in my brain--Hey Pete go start up the trading platform and see where that fuckn QUBT is trading at. Then I never write a single word and the draft collects dust until I stop trading (only because I reached fog of shame point from bad trading and had to stop entirely). I can't quite solve how to be a creative person and a trader at the same time. Maybe I just have to establish both on their own seperate days and do it for years and years and maybe after 10 years I can see how it can co-mingle.