Who is The Trader? The Trader goes by many names. The Trader, The Muse (Homer’s Odyessy), the holy spirit, the Buddha, your God, my God, angels, your gut, flow state, intuition, or a being from another plane of existence. I know when I put on a trade, I’m the conduit for The Trader. The source lies elsewhere. I relax and let The Trader handle the trades while I handle the clicking. I can categorize my life into two parts: before and after I invoked The Trader.
Before I invoked The Trader, I had a full-time job that, to the delight of the social isolation preferring me, was currently remote due to covid. Every day the same: hopefully wake up on time, spread out my work to make it seem like I was busy all day, answer the phone, etc. The data, math, and accounting-related work was easy to me and difficult to others, which helped me get away with it. I’d invoke The Muse and start working on my tech side-business at 3:00 when my boss was done for the day. That side-hustle ultimately went nowhere. All while starving off the depression and imagining how financial freedom and being debt-free will make it better.
Day after day. That was it. I was engaged, owned 30% of a house with the bank owning the rest, $38,000 in credit card debt, and lived paycheck to paycheck between me and my fiance. I was in a fairly bottom-of-the-barrel place a few years earlier, but now this fairly typical middle-class was fine with fairly easy work with good pay, yet tedious and moving laterally fast. That was until I found Doge on Reddit and bought in as much as I could at $0.034. My introduction to crypto. This was late February 2021. Down the rabbit hole we go.
Twitch was the place I looked to the pros for guidance in gaming. I even used to watch the Staples brothers when I was unemployed and learning poker 6 years prior (I never could invoke The Player). I found TraderSamwise and my eyes opened to leveraged futures trading. He had invoked The Trader, live, in front of hundreds of viewers. By March 2021, I was officially trading futures. It would take me 6 months and $35,000 deposited before I could invoke The Trader, too.
Long story short, TraderSamwise became an invaluable mentor for me in trading and the main reason I believe I have made and kept any money at all. As a developer, I began working with Sam on his company Tealstreet during these 6 months of learning trading. I eventually quit my job to work with Sam and Lat043 growing Tealstreet. Trading with Tealstreet, working on Tealstreet, and punting deposit after deposit on Bybit and FTX. Bitcoin mini-bear was over and I shorted every candle from 30k upwards, liquidating over and over and over. All the while losing money, I was working on my strategy. Removing indicators. Getting down to basics. Making my own assumptions. My assumptions? Or letting The Trader make assumptions. Going with my gut. I told Sam twice that “I feel like I almost have it figured out.” Turns out I was right. I put the last $2k I could afford to lose and shorted $53k on 20x. It was the local top.
That was my first “runner.” One where you caught the pico top or bottom. I took 2k to about $15k. Then bought spot, options, traded Adventure Gold, and longed my longs on every support/resistance flip from $43k upward (after the $39k bottom). In approximately 4 days, the $15k was $80k. Put $30k in the bank, as per Sam’s advice.
FTX had an issue with their PNL chart and also didn’t capture PNL that transferred to subaccounts. You can also see the large diagonal line where PNL stopped working at all. Aside, you can see the chaos that ensued in these couple months. Nearly liquidated the account twice and thankfully withdrew some before each, but had three massive runners which account for my net worth today. The 3rd was $110k. What did it take? Staying up for days on end, watching charts and/or being aware of price all day, sleeping with alerts… normal healthy behavior. A sort of mania. Like writing a symphony. I honestly can’t recall most of it. Maybe that’s because it wasn’t me doing the trading.
Now comes the Twitch saga. With TraderSamwise on vacation / working on Tealstreet, I turned on his stream for the community members that stick around through offline chat (you can watch my vods here starting November 27, 2021). Without really trying, deposited $35k and quickly turned it into $130k live on the internet. The Trader was trading; me (the ego) was not. I was in flow state.
This win marked another peak in my trading. Another runner. I immediately withdrew the initial $35k deposit and basically everything I had in other accounts… but kept the rest on this account.
At this point, the score lies at $120k cash withdrawn, $38k credit card debt paid off, $35k other crypto, and about $100k to trade with. While great that I made more than my prior salary in 2 months, it didn’t make me happier. If anything, I felt more depressed because I thought it would have changed that.
This is where it went south. Over the following 3 weeks and live for all to see, I managed to grind down that 100k profit to $3,000. How? I think a combination of many things.
- Afraid to take atypical or counter-market trades that my gut (The Trader) was telling me to take. Afraid to lose more flipping sides and looking dumb. There were two instances where I wanted to short when it looked long and long where it looked short, both ended up being correct and big moves, but I took neither trade.
- Trading on the fallacy of house money. I was on pure profit, therefore I didn’t care if I lost. Looking back, it would have been nice to keep.
- Afraid of being wrong on my entries. The ego wanted bad trades to turn around, but The Trader would have closed at a loss. The point is to make and keep money, not to be right.
- Burnout / clinical depression. Working and trading aggressively pretty much since day one with no breaks and very few other activities. Streaming was a great distraction from this and exacerbated it.
- Losing scope of the bigger picture… in both market timeframe and why I was doing this in the first place.
It was time for a break.
I looked at this monstrosity of screens. I closed the TA chart and six other tabs in the top left monitor. I turned off Tealstreet in the middle-left monitor. I turned off the BTC 5m on the grocery shelf monitor in the bottom left. I turned off each tablet above my desk individually. First aggr.trade, then the hourly with ETH, DOGE, BTC, and BNB. On the bottom row, I turned off Open Interest and the BTC, ETHBTC, BTC.D, and SPX daily charts.
I sat back and nine out of ten screens were black or empty. I had a single browser window open. I had forgotten what I normally used a computer for. I never saw the screens for what they were… just… screens. They held so much more emotion, stress, and symbolism than that for all these months.
This was the first time I “turned it off” since I started trading. It made me realize this is what I was striving towards… peace and freedom. The ability to do what I want. Trading is fun, but the freedom it brings is the goal. I cannot sacrifice that by chasing dopamine hits, home runs, or trading for anyone else. That’s fun, exciting, and entertaining, but won't get me to the feeling I’m feeling now.
Mentally satisfied, I felt physically disgusting. I got up from my chair and walked out the office door. I briefly looked back and saw a man sitting in my chair. He is cross-legged and affixed to something on the screens that he only can see. Unbathed, a beard touching his chest, and a few weeks of growth on the top with a balding runway down the middle. It was The Trader. In this moment, I don’t know him.
I descended to the bathroom to clean up. I look in the mirror and, again, the same strange grown man was looking back at me. He followed me there. I ignored him and unintentionally recreated the scene in which Luke Wilson cuts his long hair and shaves his beard during his mental breakdown in The Royal Tenenbaums. This time it didn’t end with a razor blade to the wrists and a trip to the hospital, however, at least in the physical sense… however I could use a metaphorical death of the ego.
And thus, for now, The Trader was gone. He had been gone for a while since the ego took over. He will be back when I need him again.
Showered and resembling a human again, I needed to leave the house. This was the first time in several days. I went for a walk around the adjacent suburban neighborhoods. It was dark and Christmas lights were lit on every other house. I saw a couple saying goodbye to another as they were loading their car with food. Then I saw a family leaving another house and saying farewell. Then again, similar scenes are on repeat. I thought that was strange. Then it occurred to me: it was Christmas eve. I didn’t know.
Christmas morning I woke up. I shouldn’t have put on a trade, but I remembered I shot for a lucky entry on Bitcoin the night prior. The idea was clear. Small size. I ticked it… or should I say The Trader ticked it. He showed himself when I wasn’t looking.
A story about learning relentlessly, never giving up, self-honesty, taking your own shots, trusting your gut, and trading for yourself and your family alone.
The Invocation of The Trader by Fraguar
(parody of The Invocation of The Muse from Homer’s Odyssey — the T. E. Lawrence of Arabia translation)
O DIVINE TRADER
GODDESS-DAUGHTER OF ALAMEDA
WALL FOR ME
THIS BIDS AND ASKS OF THE VARIOUS-BIASED MAN
WHO AFTER HE HAD LIQUIDATED
THE INNERMOST STOPLOSS OF HALLOWED SUPPORT
WAS MADE TO BREAK GRIEVOUSLY
ABOUT THE ASKS OF MEN
THE TRADE OF THEIR CUSTOMS BULL OR BEAR
WHILE HIS HEART
THROUGH ALL THE SCALPING
ACHED IN AN AGONY TO REDEEM HIMSELF
AND BRING HIS BALANCE BREAKEVEN
VAIN HOPE — FOR THEM
FOR HIS TRADES HE TOOK IN VAIN
THEIR OWN WITLESSNESS PUNTED THEM AWAY
THE FOOLS
TO DESTROY FOR COINS
THE WHALES OF THE MOST EXALTED SUN
WHEREFORE THE MARKET MAKERS BLOTTED OUT
THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN
MAKE THE TRADE LIVE FOR US
IN ALL ITS MANY BEARINGS
O TRADER
This is my trading journey thus far and certainly isn’t over. With many insights taken from Stoicism, Buddhism, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, Homer’s Odyssey, psychology, long nights, disassociations, TraderSamwise, Tealstreet family, and Twitch chat. ❤
