Trading

Ten years
trading my own capital.

It is my primary income. Long enough in to have been badly wrong more than once and still be doing it.

This page exists because people ask. The way I reason about a market is the way I reason about a business, so it seemed worth writing down.

I think in theses, not tickers.

A ticker is a thing to own. A thesis is a claim about the world that has to survive contact with evidence, and that tells you in advance what would prove you wrong. The second part is the whole discipline. Everything else is execution.

Where the edge comes from

I trade what
I'm inside of.

I'm inside all three of the ecosystems I trade, and participation is my research.

AI

Equities and onchain

In AI I build with it and build it, onchain and off.

DeFi

Onchain

I use DeFi directly, lending, borrowing and more.

Culture

Collectibles

I make collectibles myself, to learn how the process actually works and where the novelty is.

Sitting at the edge of the experimentation is what lets me judge what will make it, and how far along maturity and adoption something really is. Plenty looks inevitable and then stalls at a stage.

Participation is my hobby. My work is charting how far something will grow.

How a trade gets made

01ObservationSomething changes in the world. It usually shows up somewhere other than a chart.
02ThesisI write down what I think that change causes. If I can't write it plainly, I don't understand it yet.
03Causal modelThe mechanism. I have to be able to draw the chain from the thing that happened to the thing I expect.
04Evidence and contradictionsWhat supports it. Then, more carefully, what would tell me I'm wrong.
05Asset expressionWhat to actually buy or sell. It's often not the obvious instrument.
06ValuationHow much of this is already in the price. Being right about the world and wrong about the price still loses money.
07Technical timingWhen to put it on. I'm usually early, and early feels the same as wrong for a while.
08StrategySize, and what I'll do at each level. I decide that before I'm in it, because I won't think clearly once I am.
09DecisionOn or off. If I'm not sure, it goes on small.
10MonitoringI watch the conditions that would kill the thesis. The P&L is downstream of those.

Where it's been

2016Started in forex.
2018Added crypto.
2021Crypto became the focus. Equities and index futures alongside it.
NowSame capital, same process. I'm building software around the parts of my process that repeat.

What this isn't

I trade my own capital only. I don't manage outside money, I'm not a financial adviser or a fund manager, and I'm not offering to become one. Nothing on this page is advice or a recommendation to buy or sell anything. It's a description of how I work, written for people who find that interesting.

I built software
around this.

The Trading Command Center runs the process above end to end. It's on the work page, along with everything else I'm building right now.

See the work