Discipline alone won’t take you to the promised land of a successful, profitable day trader. You also need to be an explorer. The market changes, and you change. You improve, and you start to see things more clearly. In that clarity, you will need to make changes, and those changes are what ultimately lead to profits.

Most days are either no trade or a loss, so the days you do profit need to be bangers. It’s a lot like travel. Many days are boring, and each city looks like the one before it. Then you are enchanted by the magic of a burrito in San Bruno, a banh mi in Hanoi, or a latte and scone in Bangkok. You don’t get those moments by staying home. You get them by showing up, again and again, and staying alert.

Adi Da, the guru who spent his later decades on a small island in Fiji, used a closed fist slowly transforming into a relaxed, open hand as an analogy for how one may live a life: open, accepting, flexible, and willing to embrace whatever may come.

It fits trading perfectly. A clenched fist is the trader who forces trades, grips a loser, and insists the market owes him something. An open hand sees what is actually in front of it. As traders, we must clearly interpret what the market is showing us, and then walk over and pick up the cash when it is lying on the floor. You can’t pick up anything with a clenched fist.

Bourdain was talking about travel, but the instruction works at the trading desk too. Don’t sit in the same comfortable ideas forever. Go look at the market from another angle, test something new, and be willing to walk in someone else’s shoes. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

Trading leaves marks too. Some are on the account and some are on the heart. Most of the time they are the good kind, the lessons and the growth. Often they hurt. The traveler doesn’t avoid the marks. He accepts them as the price of the trip.

Approaching day trading the way you have approached prior projects does not seem to work. You can’t muscle your way through it. Hard work is required, but that alone will not get you across the finish line.

What is required is a level of self awareness, spatial awareness, and acceptance. You have to know what you are feeling, know where you are in the market, and accept what the market is giving you today instead of what you wanted it to give you.

Anger can be a powerful engine for change in many circumstances. Here, with the charts, it will get your account blown up. That is the closed fist at work.

So what am I saying? I can’t say I have anything figured out. But I can say I am open to continual learning and to embracing the unknown, as I pursue this glorious profession. That is the traveler’s mindset. Keep moving, keep the hand open, and see what the next city has to offer.

Trade safe,
Jay Cradeur
Founder, Day Trader Dojo

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